There was a time when I thought the “writers can't be sober” hypothesis was a complete load. Writing requires a certain amount of mental clarity, I reasoned, and you can't expect that from someone vomiting in the gutter. And since everything after the first draft is a frustrating, mechanical process involving lots of rewrites and edits, it also requires time and diligence (two things your average junkie can barely comprehend, let alone put to good use). Yessir, I put that old chestnut to bed long ago.

But then I thought about it. The list of writers under the influence is long and varied, and the only tangible works of people who wrote sober are yearly earnings reports and the poetry of William Wordsworth. Neither end is a terribly promising one. Given the choice between wandering through fields of daffodils while some nancyboy poet yammered on about his idyllic childhood or drifting away into one of Coleridge's vivid opium mirages, I'd be pounding on the golden doors of Xanadu before Wordsworth could spit (not that he ever would, the bastard).

And Coleridge is but one example. Edgar Allan Poe, one of the finest literary minds of his era, would have freebased crack out of an empty beer can if you'd left him alone with one. Ernest Hemingway drank until he could write himself into a world where he was masculine (c'mon, Wallace Stevens kicked his ass). Hunter S. Thompson's brain could barely function unless it was first bludgeoned by LSD and loud explosions. And Stephen King, who's as rich as he is prolific, wrote his best novels hopped up on enough booger sugar (i.e. cocaine) to kill a platoon of United States Marines. Where are their sober counterparts? Where are the biographies of writers that don't end in sad, beery puddles of excess and debauchery?

The answer is clear. I must pummel my brain into creative submission by some means. The kicker is, what with me being straight edge and all, drugs and alcohol will never be part of the equation for me. I still recognize that for every Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Philip K. Dick, there are about a million Billy Carters (Jimmy Carter's brother, the Billy Beer guy—yeah, there's a reason you don't remember him) who don't do anything with their narcotic stupors except embarrass themselves and die.

Luckily for me, there's a cheaper and less consumptive option: sleep deprivation. As of this writing, I've been awake for a shade over 48 consecutive hours. Not on purpose, you understand. College ruined what had been a normal sleep schedule by providing tons of reasons for me to not go to bed, and the effects linger today. So rather than fight it by lying in bed with my eyes shut, my body rigid with determination, I stumble over to my desk and put pen to paper. The results are astounding. The words casually roll out of my brain like waves lapping over the beach, and the images they form are just as effortless and crisp. They also smell saltier than usual, but I'm sure the simile I just used has something to do with that. The overall experience is downright ambrosial, and as I scribble madly away I feel like maybe I have a shot at doing for some reader what my favorite writers have done for me.

Oh sure, there are disadvantages. My eyes feel like old leather and tend to roll around in my head uncontrollably, and the divots in my brain are deep and wide enough to serve punch from, but overall it's a net gain.

Sometimes I see things. Odd patches of color that flare up the same way fire burns holes through old film, or tiny black dots that bounce around my field of vision. Lately, there's been a giant lagomorph holding vigil under my bed, and he puzzles me greatly. I have no idea how he fits under there—he's got to be 150 pounds if he's an ounce, and my bed isn't that tall. He enjoys the smell of freshly bitten fingernails, or he seems to, and communicates by reciting Black Sabbath lyrics chosen at random. I just asked him what he's doing down there, and his response was “nobody will ever let you know/when you ask the reasons why.” Not sure how he feels about, say, being scratched on the head. Like most rodents, he's pretty jumpy and scurries around frantically under the bed if I make any sudden movements. I'll never get my rent deposit back at this rate – the floor down there probably looks like I've been ice skating on it. He has claws, you see.

But we're straying from the topic, which was something about sleep or drugs, one of the two. We should probably return to it, because it sounds pretty interesting.

No one's ever really explained why writing attracts so many addictive personalities. Are heightened senses and a keen awareness of the world around you so unbearable that they need regular dulling? Fuck yes, say most people who have them. They almost universally find that all heightened senses and keen awareness of the world around you are good for is the gloomy realization that people are idiots and life is unfair. Irrevocably unfair. Rich means strength, poor means weakness, and anyone in the middle gets pulled between them like taffy until they break. So not only are people dumb, but they're destructive and greedy and pollute everything they touch. If the only thing keeping you from that fate was your own wavering objectivity, you'd probably drink yourself into a Fitzgeraldesque haze and beg for death. Shit, you might even write The Great Gatsby. If that book isn't a desperate cry for help, nothing is.

Of course, another theory is that wastrels gravitate towards the music of letters because you don't have to go anywhere or do anything, or even wear pants, as a writer. In fact, you're paid to say any stupid, irresponsible thing that comes to mind as long as enough people read it. That's why I do it, pretty much. And the freedom to make your own schedule opens up a lot of time to feed your addictions. No one who has to be at work by 8:30 am can risk drinking half a bottle of whiskey and showering a rented female companion with the other half while his brain sprouts wings made of Columbian Marching Powder (also cocaine) and flies off into the ether. But when you can sleep till noon and every day is essentially Friday for you, why not? You know deep down that your publishers will bail you out of lock up if necessary, and you plan to test this belief, so moderation isn't so much a watchword as an ironic suggestion made at 3am by someone just as drunk and stoned as you are. Relax. Your work is brilliant and people love you.

That is, until they stop. Then there's no buffer between you and the awful truth of what you've become, and life—which you were too busy living to really notice—hits you like a charging rhinoceros.

The young rake's rapid deterioration into the old junkie is heartbreaking to see. These vibrant, freewheeling gadflies eventually turn into Anasazi pottery; their time has passed, and while they were beautiful and useful once, they'll collapse into dust if you touch them now. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself once he realized how much of a doddering, brittle old man he'd become. Hemingway did the same thing, riding both barrels to glory in a fit of paranoia that later turned out to be justified. And not only did Poe die in a gutter, he died in Baltimore, a city that marks where the hose would go if the East Coast were given an enema. Even though none of those men reached their 70th birthday – Poe didn't even make it to 50 – the consensus is that they lived too long.

It all lies heavy in the mind, made heavier still by that evil rabbit thing singing “War Pigs” under my bed and scuttling around in the limited space he's allowed himself. He's jostling the mattress, for God's sakes. I can't write under these conditions. If he gets any more agitated, he might just chew up through the damn bed and gnaw my legs off.

It's just as well that I end here anyway because my eyes feel like they have bricks in them and I can barely keep them open, plus whatever point I was trying to make ran off to join the circus half a page ago. Chalk that up to the ungodly hours I keep. Which are my own fault of course, but if there's another entry point to the section of my brain with all the funny jokes and wacky concepts and enough mortar to keep them together, it's one I haven't found. And given the many examples of people so bound to one method that they ignore any alternatives, it's a troubling thought. Perhaps we writers are wandering lonely as clouds, trapped in self-destructive behavior patterns because we're afraid they're the only things keeping us relevant.

No. Only one person can wander lonely as a cloud. And that person is doing it right now, in Hell. Where he shall remain forever.