Last night was a rough one. It was a night when you get to bed later than you had intended and then have really intense dreams and you wake up in cold sweat. You’re very hot so you throw the blanket off of you. Big mistake. It is freezing in your bedroom. You forgot that because you were, until a moment ago, asleep. Great, so now you’ve got a chill in your bones. Especially in your toes. You’d better put some socks on. But you never wear socks to bed. So, as you lie there trying to fall back asleep you keep startling yourself awake again because something foreign is moving around under the covers. It’s your socked foot.

You finally manage to get back to sleep when CRASH, lightning strikes. Did you forget it was storming? I know I did. Or then the cat comes in to lie on your face. Not the top of your head like normal, but your face. The part that warm air comes out of. The cat equates your face to the floor vents pumping out warm snuggly air. It really is too bad that you breathe out of your face, you know, since there’s a cat on it now.

Exhausted and fed up, you finally just resign yourself to troubled sleep. It is then that the alarm clock goes off and you have to force your exhausted body to the end of the bed, through the freezing bedroom air, to punch the ever loving shit out of that little box with the incredibly irritating redneck voices coming out of it. Right now, you’d sell your soul to the Penguin for vengeance against these assholes. Granted, it is your own fault that you wake to that drivel. You set the alarm clock. If only NPR wasn’t so relaxing. You remember the morning when you woke up to hear the reports of the attacks on the twin towers and you hit the snooze button. The NPR reporters are all so calm and professional all the time, you had no idea that freedom haters had come for your babies. It’s not your fault you slept through it.

If only you could have slept through it all last night. But sleeping through something that is hundreds and hundreds of miles away is one thing. And that was a long time ago. You’re older now and sleep is slowly leaving you. One day a little bit further down the road you’ll find that sleep only comes for a few hours a night. Like weekend visitation rights with your kids. Like a nurse who comes to change your bedpan.

Jeezus. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten those hot brown burritos right before bed. Maybe you should have got into bed earlier instead of staying up playing solitaire. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Suck it up Nancy, it’s time to go to work. More soon. ~SC