Nothing by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online

popular theological movement, appearing on the face of Time . Years, for many, as they pass, feel less like years, shorter in spanning and longer in the minutes of the day. Parts of songs begin appearing inserted backwards in popular music, advertisements, infecting our idea of what we hear in what we hear.
    In the 1970s, we get digital photography, videocassettes, pocket calculators, instant noodles, space stations, e-mail, and karaoke. For the first time, narcolepsy is diagnosed in a dog. Reverend Jim Jones installs speaker systems in his Peoples Temple commune in Guyana, broadcasting his ranting at all hours, through the night. “A lot of people are tired around here,” Jones says, “but I’m not sure they’re ready to lie down, stretch out, and fall asleep.” Kales associates insomnia with a state of “constant emotional arousal,” whose physiological effects include high heart rate, restricted veins, raised rectal temperatures, and an increase in body movement while trying to nod off—all, for him, by-products of internalizing one’s emotions and environments, absorbing them into the blood. We get microprocessors, Ethernet, the personal computer, the Happy Meal. We get stereo, the Walkman, the Rubik’s cube, DNA sequencing, the digital camera, Gore-Tex, Atari. Gary Gilmore, facing his own death, demands, “Let’s do it.” The world population passes four billion.
    In the ’80s, we get CDs, flash memory, the artificial heart, hair metal, digital audio tape, the internet. A record number of people tune in to the soap opera Dallas , caught up in a conspiracy of who shot the central character—the programmed death of such manifestations, as well as who is fucking who in pretend on screen, will continue to be primary reasons for tuning in to anything for a lot of people. “The succession of the seasons and the superposition of the same season from different years dissolves forms and persons and gives rise to movements, speeds, delays, and affects,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “as if as the narrative progressed something were escaping from an impalpable matter.” 126
    In 1981, the sleep drug trazodone is approved by the FDA. It will come to be known by many other names, like a god: it will be Beneficat, Deprax, Desirel, Desyrel, Molipaxin, Thombran, Trazorel, Trialodine, Trittico. During the next thirty or so years, the presence of these pills will replicate in name and manner of effect, including: zolpidem (increases sleep time, and in some cases has been found to revive patients from a minimally conscious coma to a fully conscious state), zaleplon (reduces awakening), estazolam (maintains duration and quality of sleep), flurazepam (helps sleep induction), quazepam (to be avoided in elderly patients), temazepam (decreases awakenings but distorts normal sleep pattern), and triazolam (known to cause adverse effects on memory). Each of these agents as well, like trazodone, enjoys a sublist of other equally mythologically dreamlike names by which they are marketed to users: zolpidem is Adormix, Ambien, Ambien CR, Edluar, Damixan, Hypnogen, Ivedal, Lioran, Myslee, Nytamel, Sanval, Stilnoct, Stilnox, Stilnox CR, Sucedal, Zoldem, Zolnod, and Zolpihexal; zaleplon is Sonata and Starnoc; estazolam is Eurodin, ProSom; flurazepam is Dalmadorm and Dalmane; quazepam is Doral, Dormalin; temazepam is Euhypnos, Norkotral, Normison, Remestan, Restoril (found in the blood of Heath Ledger on his deathbed, along with the OTC pill Unisom), Temtabs, and Tenox; triazolam is Apo-Triazo, Halcion (Jeffrey Dahmer’s brand of choice for sedating victims), Hypam, and Trilam. Each pill as well might have many names saved for the street: “terms for temazepam include King Kong pills, jellies, jelly, Edinburgh eccies, tams, terms, mazzies, temazies, tammies, temmies, beans, eggs, green eggs, wobbly eggs, knockouts, hardball, norries, oranges, rugby balls, ruggers, terminators, red and blue, no-gos, blackout, green devils, drunk pills,