sleep

• Jacuzzi and / or hot tub
• the rim of a volcano
• marriage counseling

Last night I dreamt that I was on the phone with person A. While I was talking with person A, person B called my cell phone. I tried to disable the ringer on my cell and could not. I became very frustrated. I smashed my cell phone and it would not stop ringing. At one point, I was on my hands and knees on the phone with person A and repeatedly whacking my cell phone - which by this point had transformed into a cross between a train set I had when I was about 10 and a 1950s-era telephone - with the sole of one of my old, battered Doc Marten’s. The cell phone-slash-train-telephone was in bits and pieces and yet would not stop ringing.

Finally person A got tired of hearing me make loud banging noises and asked to call me later. So I answered my cell phone by holding a miniscule particle of speaker to my ear and it was my mom on the other end, telling me that my grandfather had finally died. I was surprised because I had watched my grandfather die of a heart attack when I was about 12 and hadn’t realized that he was, in fact, living in a retirement community in Naples. It was very sad because, she said, he had bed sores and bad skin and was neglected by the evil caretakers at the home. During this entire conversation, though, the cell phone was still ringing.

I woke up and realized that my alarm had been ringing for about ten minutes.

I never said it was an interesting story.

Sleep hogs beware. A new study suggests that individuals who sleep eight hours or more a night actually have an increased death rate compared to those who average fewer hours. Study subjects who slept seven hours a night had the best survival rates. Those sleeping eight hours a night were 12 percent more likely to die over the course of the study than were those sleeping seven hours a night.

I found a link on the mini-wetlog to this stress busting organization’s article on insomnia. One person suggested sex and bananas as sure-fire cures. (No, not at the same time.)

Tonight I plan on getting to bed before 11 pm. Sure, this is a bit unusual for me since I haven’t made it to sleep before 3 am in a few weeks. But tomorrow night is the Stone Temple Pilots concert at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando and I want to have plenty of energy for that!

As I crawled lugubriously from my bed this morning, I made myself a promise I swore I would keep. Come hell or high water. Regardless of anything that should happen in my life. No matter the cost. Under whatever circumstances. For the love of all that is good and holy. If I have to rip the computer from the wall with my bare hands. I shall be in bed by 2 am this very night!

<posted at 3:07 am>

Sleep? I doh-ah nee no steenkin’ sleep.
Visine, now. And coffee. They come in handy. 7:20 am and all is well. Or something. I fell asleep in a rage because I had written, of course, the perfect post. Oh, it was a thing of beauty. It was the post to end all posts. And then I accidentally opened a new window while checking to make sure my ulti-post was as perfect as I knew it was. And it was gone. Man, it was beautiful, though. You woulda loved it. I mean it.
So anyway. That’s what I get when I try to post once more after I said I was going to sleep.
Now? Now I’m awake. Awake and ashamed to admit that I found this tremendously well-written essay on jetpacks not at the site of its creator, but over at Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall.

Today it has rained. Rain. Lots of rain. Biblical rain. Tampa, Fl? Very wet. Just thought you’d like to know. I slept. Lots of sleep. Biblical sleep. David V. Gagne? Very well rested.

And then, on top of all that, you decide that you’ll stay awake just a few more minutes because it’s dark-fifteen and then go to bed and you have to go to Gene’s wedding 140 miles away tomorrow morning. So there’s that. Whatever that is. Oh yeah, and you decide to drop a name: spencer

Finally got to bed around five. Somehow Sylvia managed to wrest me from unconsciousness around 6:30 long enough for me to understand that she was leaving for the hospital. (She’s working 7-7 in the ER today and tomorrow.) My death-like slumber was disturbed around 8:30 by the carpenters from DeNome Construction working with a SawZall and hammers and skill saw and - I assume - a jackhammer on the little piece of my skull right behind my left ear. It has been said by greater minds than mine that I could sleep through a freight train running through my living room. That always makes me think of an episode of Steven Spielberg’s old Amazing Stories show. Regardless. They are incorrect. No one can sleep through a SawZall. So I was up by 8:33 and drinking coffee. Screw this. If I have to do this, so does Jorge. Nothing like waking your best friend in LA around 7 PST. heh heh.

Sunday mornings are my favorite time of the week. Okay. Maybe not. Maybe just right now. Whatever. Somehow I was wide awake at 8:00 this morning even though I didn’t get to sleep until around 3:30 am. I washed the coffee pot, stared out the window while the Master Blend was a-brewing, noticed that the air conditioner drip pipe in the backyard wasn’t dripping, wondered if that meant the a/c was clogged and if that was the source of the mysterious water stains on the living room ceiling, put on my trusty re-run t-shirt, searched for and finally found the stepladder, climbed into the attic in my boxers and t-shirt, crawled around for a bit as if I knew what the hell an a/c drip pipe would look like in a dark attic, saw something that looked like an Easter egg in the mush of insulation, hit my head on a nail, decided that the a/c was fine and I was just being paranoid (the water stains were probably there all along and I just hadn’t noticed them), managed to get down from the attic without killing myself, went into the backyard, stuck my fingers into the a/c drip pipe, realized that it probably wasn’t dripping like it was supposed to because it was a beautiful 70-something degrees and the a/c wasn’t even running, felt like an idiot, and made it back to the kitchen just as the coffee pot was bleeping that it was done. Quite an exciting half-hour actually. All that already today, plus I mercilessly cut-n-pasted Joe’s fauxcam gizmo and created my own pop-up cam. So now if you click on my cam shot you can - why? - keep it open in a little updating window on your desktop. This should save some wear and tear on your F5 key, as I know that thousands of you are sitting there constantly refreshing my page …

In what can only be described as a sleeping orgy, David manages to sleep from 5 am to 4:15 pm today. heh heh

I am so tired! Sometimes I am totally amazed at how quickly the day zips by me … It seems like I just woke up late for work and now I’m already late for bed (again). I meant to update a bunch of stuff here - most notably the news from India - but I gotta get some sleep. G’night.

Well this was my first morning without Sylvia to wake me. I’m happy to announce that I was awake before 6:45 am and made it to work on time. The reports of my narcolepsy were greatly exaggerated.
Status Report: Sylvia called from Paris around midnight. She and Bhrett are doing well. Their plane left for Delhi at 3 am (Paris time) and it is a ten-hour flight.
Ron and I talked for a long time last night about the future of Oceans and what can and should happen in the next few months.
Sylvia bought me a red metallic snowboard key chain last weekend. It’s pretty nifty. I just put it on my keys this morning.