When I listed my three New Year’s resolutions over a month ago, I apparently I forgot to include a fourth: I resolve to lose my fucking mind.

[As for the other three, they're not going so well.  God and I are on our worst terms ever, what with the Giants winning the Super Bowl and redtube crashing for three days last week; work has been so busy that I don't have time to grab a drink "after work", since I need to go home to iron shirts and curse a lot; and do you have any idea how hard it is to find women willing to participate in a threesome?  Holy crap.  And I was one of People's 50 Hottest Bachelors for Christ's sake! (A long time ago, and I'm easily the shittiest one ever, but still!) Do it for the story! My futile attempts at arranging a threesome really deserve a post of its own, so I'll stop here.]

My recent insanity (or, as I call it, crazy ballsness) is varied and vengeful, so we must break it down in order to more properly understand it.

Crazy Ballsness While Conscious
I blame this on Site Guy Brendan.  At the end of last summer, because of myriad technical problems with the email ending in "@jasonmulgrew.com", Site Guy Brendan arranged it so that all the email I got to that address was automatically forwarded to my personal email on gmail, which makes it much easier to sort, find and respond to (using the "@jasonmulgrew.com", um, suffix or whatever).  Terrific.

Let it be known that I’m a terrible emailer in the first place – my friends joke that I respond to emails with the speed and reliability of whatever came before the Pony Express – so getting back to your emails (or anyone’s emails) has never been the best part of my game.  I’m sorry.  If you must love me, you must love all of me.

So while the email system was much improved thanks to this innovation by SGB, as weeks and months went by, the system began to break down.  I’m lazy and bad at emailing and as the emails kept coming in, I’d lose personal ones, forget to respond to important ones, and generally turned into a total flake whose preferred and almost exclusive method of communication was text message, employed only after 11:30pm, only on Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights, and only after attaining a blood alcohol level of .06.

And then suddenly, a few weeks ago, things changed.

I discovered that gmail has a "labels" system in their email.  That is, you can apply a label to each email for identification and sorting purposes.  I shouldn’t say that I "discovered" these labels a few weeks ago, because I always knew they existed, but I finally started using them.  For example, my labels are Regular, for those boring old regular ones from friends and family; Reader, for those from y’all; Hollywood, for anything relating to my we’re-past-pathetic-and-now-into-desperate-territory attempts at something that will get me blown by two women (for free) (for the most part); and Junk, for shit from Delta and Expedia and creditors.   

It started innocently enough.  Each time I got a new email, I’d flag it with one of those labels.  The order and lessening of inboxal chaos made me happy.  And then more emails came in, and I added labels to those.  More order made me more happy.  More emails, more labels, more order, more happiness.  My inbox was shaping up nicely.

But there was a problem.  The labeling system worked great for new emails, but what about all the emails from the past?  Surely they needed labels, right?  Each time I got a new email and labeled it, the fact that there were thousands before those newly-categorized emails without labels made me than much…unhappier.

So I started going back and labeling old emails.  I’ll spare you the tedium that has been borne out of my new obsession, but as of about six weeks ago, I had around 8000 emails, all without labels.  Now about 5300 of these have labels.  And I won’t stop until they’ve all been labeled.  So whereas before I was bad at replying to emails, I now spend whatever time I would have spent replying to emails working on my Great Label Project.  There are times when I think that this is the reason that God put me on this earth.  

(Well, this and to create Reach Up for the Sunrise, an organization inspired by the Duran Duran song, that aims to "promote the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals to art and culture, to support the advancement of new GLBT artists, and to spend a lot of time dancing around like a gay, like with twirls and everything.")

Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.  It has become an obsession.  I haven’t lost my job, lost my wife, or started sucking dick for cheeseburgers and computer access.  Nor do I spend hours and hours doing this, but only maybe 30 minutes a day, usually while lying on the couch watching a rerun of The First 48.  But still I don’t know why I’m so determined, so compelled, to get this done.  When finished labeling a batch of emails, I feel accomplished, like I’ve just finished a marathon or eaten a shit-ton of pancakes.  And when I don’t do it, well, it don’t feel right.

And this obsession has now spilled into another area near and dear to my heart: my iTunes playlist.  I’ve written before that my iTunes is organized around star ratings.  That is, five-star songs are the best and are included on a supreme playlist (only 87 of the 9018 songs on my iTunes have a five-star rating).  Four-star are not quite as good and are lumped with five-star songs in my "Seriously Good Shit" playlist, etc.  A month ago, over 2000 of my songs had no rating at all.  At that point, I lumped these songs into an "Unrated" playlist, and now rate an average of 40 songs a day for proper categorization.  I am a rating machine and slowly but surely, I will have nary a song without a star rating.   

This, I admit, is a little crazy, but at least there is an objective benefit to my iTunes OCD: I’m creating better playlists, finding "new" music, and thus advancing my enjoyment of music and life in general.  The gmail labels thing…I got nothing there.  It’s helpful for me to keep track of emails, but I don’t necessary need to categorize emails from two years ago between my roommates and I about what kind where we should have our friend’s birthday party.  And like I said, because I’m spending so much of my energy labeling these emails, I responding less and less to email, which is counter productive.

And then there’s the desire and the genuine feeling of discomfort knowing that, as I write this, there are emails in my inbox and songs in my iTunes without labels and ratings.  

Fucking fires me up.         

Crazy Ballsness While Unconscious
For most of my life, I have suffered from two nocturnal afflictions:

1) Sexsomnia.  This is exactly like it sounds like.  Years ago, an ex-girlfriend told me that I started feeling her up in my sleep, before I tried to make out with her.  In the morning, I got the "Do you know what you did last night?" line and I thought for sure I had peed or poo’ed in her bed.  When she told me what I had done, I had no recollection of it.  But, whatever.  I’m awesome, and I like making out and sleeping, so it’s only natural that I should combine the two.  I chalked it up to a one time thing. 

But it wasn’t.  Over the years, I’d fall asleep next to whatever girl happened to be getting back at her ex and/or father at the time, and I’d wake up and we’d be doing it.  I’m not talking like heavy petting here; we’d be doing it, like actual intercourse.  In the midst of this, I’d suddenly come to consciousness, completely disoriented, grasp what was going on, and totally keep going.  Because it was awesome.

[This wouldn't be an R, because for this sex to happen, the girl would have to acquiesce.  Basically, I'd be asleep and start trying to be smooth.  My ladyfriend would be woken up by this, would either think I was awake or I was doing my sleep sex thing (depending upon how familiar she was with me), and would either go with it or push me away.  If she pushed me away, I'd wake up without knowing what happened.  If she kept going, I'd wake up and be getting laid.  Sweet.]

[Also, I think that ex-ladyfriends would go with it because I'm probably a much better lover in my sleep.  While sexsomniaing, I don't speak at all.  While conscious and having sex, my every move is peppered with talking, like "Geez, I'm sorry" or "Whoa - is that what it's supposed to look like?" and "I swear I just washed there."]

I don’t know what causes this.  It’s not as though it would happen after weeks of not getting laid.  In some instances, I would have sex only an hour or two before, then "wake up" and want to do it again (which is very impressive, considering it takes me 24-96 hours to recover between non-masturbatory orgasms; I only need ten minutes and a sandwich between beat breaks).  And at first, it was kinda rare, but in my last serious relationship, it occurred maybe once every eight times my ex and I shared a bed.  Weird?  Yes. Awesome? Goddamn right.  Anytime I can get right to the good stuff without having to use any foreplay or purchase any fancy dinner and do it while I’m sleep, well, that’s just fucking terrific.   

(However, because of the sexsomnia I can never, ever, under any circumstances share a bed with a dude.  Just not a good idea.  At all.  Talk about Russian roulette.  Yikes.)

This sexsomnia affliction has no bearing on my current craziness, since I haven’t been sharing a bed too often lately.  But I wanted to point it out to show that there is a precedent for crazy while unconscious.  And also to show you that I’m more of a creep than you ever thought.  

2) Sleepwalking.  Typically, I’ve sleptwalked only when a) intoxicated and b) in a strange place.  Also, urine would be a regular feature in my sleepwalking (i.e. I’m home over Christmas break, I get bombed, fall asleep and then sleepwalk to where the toilet would be in my apartment but where the hamper is in my mom’s house, and pee there).   

Rarely if ever has there been instances of sober sleepwalks in the place in which I live.  Until about two weeks ago.

One night about two weeks ago, I went to bed, on a weeknight, drug and alcohol-free, in my bed, under the covers, with the lights off.  I woke up a few hours later in the middle of the night, with all the lights in my bedroom on.  The room light and my night table lamp, both on.  Big lights, shining brightly, me waking up at 4am.  I have no idea how this happened.

A few nights later, I went to bed, again completely normally and sober.  Just your average night in my comfy bed.  I woke up a few hours later in the middle of night, laying on my couch in the darkness.  On the couch, in the dark, in the living room, around 5am.  I have no idea how this happened.

Two nights ago, I went to bed, all was normal.  I was wearing boxers and a t-shirt, which is what I normally sleep in.  I woke up a few hours later in the middle of the night, not wearing a shirt, not wearing any boxers, but wearing a pair of mesh shorts that were on my bedroom floor and no shirt.  In a complete change of clothes, but still in my bed, in the dark.  I have no idea how this happened.

So that’s three times in the past week that I’ve been doing something really weird in my sleep.  Again, I admit, when I’m drunk, strange things happen when I "fall asleep" (see: falling asleep/passing out with apartment door wide open and falling asleep/passing out in bathroom with shower running).  But sober?  That is unusual.

************

The sleepwalking, combined with the obsessive-compulsive behavior with my email and my iTunes, brings me to only one conclusion: after years of holding it together with good vodka, fantasy sports, and constant exposure to pictures of boobies, I may finally be losing it.  If this is the case, I can say for certain that I’ve had a good run, and will embrace my downward spiral into mental illness with open arms.  Because, c’mon, everyone knew it was pretty much only a matter of time anyway.

("Reach up for the sunrise…Put your hands into…the big sky…")