Albert sits for hours taking in show after show, commercial after commercial, until he’s had his fill. Loaded like a gun, he turns off his set and crawls into bed, where he simmers in angry thoughts until his body overtakes his mind, forcing him to sleep. He lies awake staging imaginary arguments with neighbors. He mentally tells the loud twenty-somethings upstairs that they should take off their shoes before they walk around because he can’t stand the clatter overhead. He tells that bozo next door not to empty his beer bottles into the recycling bin at 1 a.m. while he is trying to sleep. If given the right opportunity, he plans to tell the fat woman who works at the post office, the one with the repugnant hairy mole, that her hairspray smells like turpentine and that she moves too slowly for his liking. He lets her know that in his opinion she could enter customer orders into her little machine faster if her fingers… weren’t…so…bloody…fat. Then a distant and irritating sound –a dripping faucet, a car alarm, a barking dog, music— catches his attention, for one does so nearly every night and snags his focus away from these imaginary debates, which, hands down, he always wins.

Albert is a self-proclaimed genuine Luddite but he loves one other instrument besides his television. His computer, an over-sized desktop model, is useful, too, because the virtual world offers myriad opportunities for argument that the real world simply does not. Albert favors simple forums, bulletin boards for topics of everyday living, not the more obvious political and news sites where debates are bound to happen. He joined a worm compost bulletin board once so that he could argue the various methods of building the best, most environmentally conscious compost. Albert doesn’t recycle his glass, paper or metals, yet he enjoys a good acrimonious mental sparring with environmentalists. Their passion presents an interesting challenge. Furthermore, Albert sees that they wish for peaceful, harmonious bulletin boards where posters support one another’s point of view, only adding to the group’s collective knowledge of red wiggler worms and wood versus plastic containers. Albert enjoys having entire communities gang up on him, trying to drive him from the site. They remind him of his former life before he moved east from his childhood home in Northern California. There, he loved watching seagulls trying to collectively drive a single raven or crow from the day’s feed, which usually consisted of garbage left by beach-going humans. Albert likes to think of himself as the crow, the bird with the highest of avian IQs.

When environmental and home repair web sites grow tiresome, Albert likes to lurk around bookstore sites, which in recent years have begun, to Albert’s delight, to encourage reader reviews. Books books books. Plenty of love and hate to be found on both sides. Predictable mutinies around every corner. All that Albert has to do is to pick a side. It never really matters. He doesn’t read the actual books. He chooses the side of a debate that will  generate the most action. Albert once spent an entire week watching arguments take form around James Frey’s fake memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Oh, how Albert loves the story! This is just the type of situation that vindicates Albert. “See?” he told Leviticus again. “You can’t trust anything you read anymore.” Leviticus only stared in silence, but he knew the score.

The most fun Albert ever had online happened just recently, when he jumped into the fray in opposition to Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great. Albert hadn’t read this book, but had heard enough about it to realize he agrees with most of Hitchens’ arguments. He knew it would be no fun to argue alongside the more rational intellectuals. Instead, Albert took the side of the impassioned religious right against the self-described Atheists of Hitchens’ school of thought so that he might level righteous, unsupported but highly-charged rhetoric at the more even-tempered types who’d actually read the book and cared enough to devise arguments in its defense.

Four days later, Albert became bored with this particular bloodbath and went back to recipe and healthcare sites. This got him thinking about his insomnia. His doctor once prescribed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety meds but Albert refused to take them. He found something comforting about the agony of sleeplessness. He’d become used to the ritual of staring out his window late at night until just after four or five o’clock in the morning, depending on the season, when the light of the sky had just begun to change.

But now he is tired. He has been awake late at night for as long as Leviticus has been mute. Albert thinks about his sister Helen, three years his junior, who has theories on Albert’s insomnia and, to Albert’s annoyance is always happy to share them. She’d remained in Northern California when Albert left to move east in the previous decade. To Helen, California was home. It was a healthy place, she’d say. It made her healthy. Made her a better person. Albert would listen to her musings only so long before he would place the receiver on the end table while she continued to speak and stare at Leviticus until he heard her inevitable cawing inquisition distorted by distance and fiber optics, “Albert? You there? Albert?!” She feared the East had hardened Albert, made him fussy and dissatisfied, restless and idle. On the contrary, Helen did yoga twice a day, ate a macrobiotic diet, worked part-time at a Mill Valley bookstore, drank green tea, watched no TV, and fell into bed (and soon after to a peaceful sleep) by nine o’clock each night. Albert once pointed out that any diversion from this routine rattled Helen to her core. She agreed and admitted that instead of traveling she’d rather stay home, where life was idyllic and comfortably predictable. Helen’s happiness comes from her ability to master control of her environment. She speaks with Albert by phone once a week on Sunday evenings from 6 p.m. PST to 6:15, which is slightly later for Albert on the East Coast. But he doesn’t sleep anyway.

Last month, Helen suggested Albert try an environmental sounds CD, “You know, for your insomnia,” she said. Albert laughed a hearty laugh. “We have real storms on the East Coast; what do I need with an audio tape recording?”

That Helen conceded so quickly upset Albert to no end. She didn’t want to argue because she didn’t like the “place” she went in arguments. Her head spun, her chest turned a deep red, her heart palpitated and, furthermore, arguments triggered her world-renowned (or so they seemed to her) four-day migraines. When Albert and Helen were young, her migraines crippled the entire family’s activities for nearly a week. Albert backed down quickly on the occasion of their environmental CD conversation because he knew that there was no use in continuing. Helen’s “Kate Hepburn” voice would emerge and once that happened, she would quickly resort to an excuse for hanging up: a plum sauce that needs stirring on the stove, or a neighbor at the door in need of tomatoes or a good garden hoe. And that would be that.

Now, nearly a week after the God is Not Great review forum experience that left Albert entirely sleepless and giddy with delirium, Albert feels he needs to change direction, to improve his slumber habits so that he might live a better life. Knowing that a simple search within a bookstore web site ensures a decent amount of anonymity, Albert decides to explore Amazon.com for a nature sounds CD. He already knows he doesn’t want something tedious or New Age. Nor does he want any of that hippie feel-good stuff his sister is into. He doesn’t want to hear people chanting, he doesn’t want drum circles, and he surely doesn’t want any of those godforsaken Peruvian flutes. Albert wants thunder.

He types THUNDERING RAINSTORMS into the amazon.com search engine.

And there it is, a perfect hit. A CD by exactly the same title.

Then Albert notices something else. This CD, this promise of healing packed into a shiny $3.99 silver disc, had more than 59 reviews. Determined to avoid the trappings of his argumentative past, he orders the inexpensive CD without reading the reviews. Three days later, having selected free Standard Shipping, it arrives.

Albert waits until his usual bedtime, 2 a.m., and then places the CD into the dilapidated player stationed across the room. He lifts the blankets and slips in between the sheets just as the first sounds of an approaching shower fill the dark space of his chilly room. He shimmies from side to side, blissfully arranging himself into a comfortable sleeping position. The thunder booms louder as the storm approaches, sending Albert into a delirious fit of happiness he hasn’t felt in years. This is going to work, he thinks to himself. I am going to sleep tonight and every night for a year! He thinks of Helen and how he can’t wait to share with her his good news. But first, he will sleep, fully and completely. And then he hears the bird.

The bird noise is quick, a gentle, inquisitive squawking somewhere in the background. At first, Albert thinks that perhaps the bird is not on the CD, but rather on his windowsill. He suspects it’s one of those now-common night singers who’s decided to vex him, to steal away his beautiful moment, because that’s just the type of thing living creatures do to one another. It’s a fiasco, this battle for peace and personal space. And then you die.

Albert lays perfectly still, the thunder still building in the background but beginning to even out. The slow crescendo makes him hungry for the sure-to-come quick and decisive bang before the rain lets loose. Then the bird calls again only this time even louder. Albert longs to fall asleep with the rain but like a leaky faucet, with each evenly spaced squawk the bird demands that Albert lie awake in wait for the next, and so on through eternity. This is not an exaggeration, a declaration from a histrionic mind, thinks Albert, because any insomniac knows that a single sleepless night is, to be sure, an eternity.

Albert feels his eyes widening in the dark and hears his heart beating loudly in his ears, boom, boom, boom. The bird has hijacked his nature experience and stolen his first good opportunity for restful sleep. Albert throws the covers from his legs and stomps across the floor to where the CD player is dutifully working. He pops the lid and the CD lodged inside spins to a stop.

In his familiar battle mode, Albert marches to his computer in preparation for telling the world about the injustice of this ill-conceived, so-called “relaxing” environmental sounds CD. When Albert gets there, though, he logs on and finds that he is not the first to have been haunted by the bird. The unfortunate bird. The bird of doom caterwauling across a sea of restlessness.

“Too bad about the bird,” one reviewer, a male, wrote. Another, a female, wrote, “This CD is supposed to help you relax and all I could think about was blasting that darn bird!” Albert feels his palms begin to sweat; a puddle of water forms along his hairline. An anonymous reviewer agreed with the woman and wrote, “I tried really hard to block out the yakking bird, but just could not. It wasn't even a pleasant bird sound, just chirp, chirp, chirp, like it was trying to say, ‘Get away from my nest’.”

Albert scrolls down the list and clicks on the arrow for the next page of reviews.

Someone wrote in poor grammar, “Bird is too noisy!” This reviewer continued, “The thunder and rain sounds great, but it is ruined by that annoying little bird! Although I enjoy the sounds of birds, the particular bird here is obnoxious. It repeats the same high pitch sound over and over again and it's very distracting.” Albert retrieves a glass of water from the kitchen. He returns and reads on.

Another man who wrote in his own name, not a pen name, felt strongly about the bird but still his comments do not assuage or entice Albert. Instead, Albert feels drained, uncharacteristically incapable of joining the battle already in session. This man wrote, “I'm dying for a good ‘rain and thunderstorm’ CD. One that doesn't have annoying music and one that doesn't have annoying birds. I don't mind birds here at home, but if I wanted a ‘singing birds’ CD I'd have looked for it. The bird during this rainstorm is so annoying I can't believe the person recording the storm didn't shoot it,” the man wrote. Another said, “THERE'S MORE THAN JUST THAT CRAZY BIRD...there's also a fly that keeps buzzing around the microphone. It almost sounds funny. I suppose it'd be funny if I wasn't trying to relax.” And another, “It's good...except for The Bird. Having grown up in the Midwest, not a rain forest, a screeching bird in the background is not something I associate with a ‘good old-fashioned thunderstorm’. The screeching reminds me of tricycles that need their squeaky wheels oiled...NOT relaxing.”

Albert clears his throat, sips his water, and continues to the next page. The reviews go on and on, promising violence upon the skull of this persistent bird, the very creature that has stolen Albert’s sleep. Now sits Albert, at 4 a.m., on the side of the majority, the populists, no, the bourgeoisie, all strategically placed against this single bird. This harbinger of sleepless nights.

A man from California wrote, “I love thunderstorms and rainstorms but that stupid insistent annoying grating freakin' stupid bird chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping..... was driving me up the wall. Aaaaaahhh!! How annoying when you're trying to relax to the sound of rain. If only I could remix and isolate that bird and kill it.” And then another sleepless soul chimed in with Albert’s very thought, “If you're looking for a nice thunderstorm to fall asleep to, this is not it, because of the bird.”

This online book retailer’s web site promises several additional pages of reviews but instead of continuing Albert punches the power button on his computer screen to “off” and stands from his chair. With nothing else to do with his night, he awakens Leviticus from a peaceful slumber and offers him a cracker. Leviticus watches Albert suspiciously, then takes the cracker and places it in his metal tray for later before returning to his vigil of Albert’s wide, expressionless face. Albert leaves the mum bird and returns to his bed. Within two minutes, he falls asleep and he doesn’t wake until morning.

Storyscape Note: The Author created this piece using actual critiques found on Amazon.com. See for yourself.