Throwback Thursday from April 2016 – “I’ll Need To Sleep On It”

Throwback Thursday from April 2016 – “I’ll Need To Sleep On It”

SLEEP – I’M IN FAVOR OF IT. I’ve had years of practice doing it. I can do almost anyplace.

Whenever I sleep witnesses have sworn that I do it with my eyes closed. Not everyone does it that way. I know someone who sleeps with their eyes wide open. Talk about Spooky. This person was not a sleepwalker with his eyes open. Nope, this fellow could be in bed, tucked in, snoring like a locomotive, with his eyes open. I’m sure there is a scientific explanation as to how and why he does that. My five cent answer is that he was possessed by demons that never sleep and stay up all night watching infomercials. Yup, spooky.

It’s About Time.

 

I MUST BE GETTING OLD. If I don’t get my sleep I am no better than a caged squirrel.

When they (not me) start adding and subtracting hours in the day they are toying with my very existence. If I want to sleep until 7 AM don’t tell me all of a sudden that it is 8 AM or, even worse, 6 AM. My body just can’t take that without putting up an argument. Get me up too early and I am nothing more than a reasonable facsimile.

Rolling Away

 

OH, GOD, IS THIS ANOTHER MONDAY?

I’m retired and I don’t have to get up and go to work anywhere, but my body and soul are reacting like I do. It’s not fair.

I should relate to Mondays like I do to Wednesdays or Saturdays – I think I’ll just roll over and catch a few more winks.

What’s the point of being retired if I respond to Monday mornings by having my stomach clench up like a fist and my brain trying to come up with some good excuses to stay home? Something needs to be done about this – something short of going out, getting a job, and then quitting the job all over again.

Watch The Water

 

I JUST GOT A NEW WRISTWATCH. I know that such a revelation is not earth-shaking, Shake and Baking, or Shake, Rattle, and Rolling.  It’s not any kind of shaking. It is just a wristwatch.

I like wristwatches. Scattered about my corner of Terre Haute (That’s French for “What time is it?”) I must have 25 or 30 wristwatches. Most of them came from E-bay which means that very few of them cost me more than ten bucks. My newest purchase came from Amazon. It ran me about $30, shipping included.

It’s Uphill Both Ways

I SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT. I’m paying for it now and it may take some time for me to catch up. Why did I do that?

Yesterday, for some reason, I ended up really tired. I certainly didn’t overwork myself at anything. I’ll just blame it on the curvature of the Earth that made me spend the whole day going uphill. The end result was that this morning I slept in an extra 90 minutes. That means that the whole world has a 90 minute headstart on me this morning.

When my toes hit the ground I was immediately playing catch-up. I’m not good at that.

You Are Getting Sleepy

I CAN AND WILL CONTINUE TO SLEEP just about anywhere. I can sleep on airplanes. I can sleep on a crowded bus. I even fell asleep on stage one time. I’m good at sleeping.

As I write this we are down in Texas once again. Family business brings us to the Corpus Christi area for the fifth month in a row and Christmas will send us south once again. This means a lot of sleeping in strange beds and some strange sleeping.

Temporal Dyslexia

WE ARE NOW INTO DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME AND I’M HOPEFUL. Technically speaking I lost an hour of sleep in the shift from Daylight Wasting Time or whatever it’s called. That change took place last Fall and even though I supposedly gained an hour all it did was screw up my life.

For years, decades even, my internal alarm clock woke me up at 7 AM. –Everyday. Each and every work day, Monday through Friday. It was a reliable alarm clock, even though it never did pick up on the trick that Weekends, Holidays, and Vacations didn’t require such diligence. I adjusted.

Everything cruised along as smooth as the sales pitch of a guy selling time-shares in Heaven…until last Fall.

I Intend To Rock Their World

THINGS WERE GOING SMOOTHLY… TOO SMOOTHLY.

All we wanted to do was get on the airplane to Texas and do the whole Christmas thing. Perhaps we were asking for too much. To put it in just a few words – “Anything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

We had a scheduled flight to take us from Indianapolis to Houston. Our liftoff time was 7:45 AM. Rather than get up at 2 in the morning to pack the car and drive to Indy we did our usual thing. We went up the afternoon before, and checked in at a hotel near the airport. That way we could get a good night’s sleep, leave the car at the hotel, and take the hotel shuttle to the nearby airport. We have done this a dozen times without any problems.

Our shuttle was set for 6 AM.

Coffee And Cake At 7 AM

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING PARTS OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON – maybe the most interesting part – is taking time to observe the children. Take a moment to watch a three year old when they first see all of the colorful and glittering lights.

I never knew eyes could be that big.

The look on the face of a Little One must be similar to when the first self-aware humans looked up at the night sky.

I Am Not A Firefly

IT’S COLD. IT’S DARK, AND MY EYES ARE WIDE OPEN. Why they are wide open at 6:15 in the morning is understandable, but not acceptable.

The body – my body, your body, anyone’s body, operates on a cycle of sunlight and darkness – activity and sleep. It is called a Diurnal Rhythm. It’s a Human thing.

There are some creatures that function in an opposite manner where they are active at night and rest during the daylight hours. They are called “Nocturnal.” Think of Bats, Fireflies, and Comedians.

The Early Bird Gets The Coffee

I LIKE THIS TIME OF DAY. The sun is not up yet. The only sounds I hear as I step outside are a few birds that are bothered by my presence as I bustle about opening and closing doors and starting the car. I try to be quiet. We do have neighbors after all. 

Go Long For Jesus.

The Time: 6:43 AM

The Place: St. Arbucks Main Chapel.

As I pulled into the parking lot, headed toward my usual Gimp Spot to leave the Toyota I noticed something unusual – the lot was almost full.

Normally at this time of day – scratch that – this time of night, the lot is all but deserted except for the cars belonging to the Early Shift Geezers who must sleep over. No matter when I arrive they are already there swilling coffee and comparing hip replacement stories.

When I stepped inside there were about fifteen additional humans in there. The extras were all young, male, and large – College students.

The Night The Lights Went Out In Terre Haute

LET’S FACE IT; I CAN NO LONGER SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT. It’s not Insomnia, or Noisy Neighbors. It’s something else called, “I gotta go potty.” This happens at least once each night, regardless of my fluid intake and that is why we have a small nightlight in the bathroom.

When I crawl out of bed in the middle of the night, more than half asleep, it is like a scene from the movie, “Poltergeist.”

“Go toward the light, Carol Ann! Go toward the light!”

Without that nightlight, well….I hate to think about it.

Throwback Thursday – from August 2015

The Mormon Tabernacle Bomb Scare

WHEN I WENT TO SEE MY DOCTOR yesterday I expected to do most of the talking.

“This feels good, that doesn’t feel good, I’m taking my meds and we’ve been on vacation.”

“I’ve been there.”

This time my Doctor surprised me by opening up and telling me a bit about himself.

He is a native of India (I figured that out all by myself) and when he was a student he travelled extensively in the U.S. by bus. He gave me a hot travel tip (forty years out of date) that Greyhound Bus sold passes for $99 that were good for unlimited travel for 99 days.

Who in their right mind would want to spend 99 days on a Greyhound bus? Obviously, the answer is the man who is now in charge of keeping me alive.

When I did not express shock, disgust or fear and did not bolt from the room, he continued with his travelogue.

Back in the days of his youth, the 1970s is my guess; his ninety-nine dollars took him to Salt Lake City (I’ve been there). He wanted to attend a performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and to hear their magnificent pipe organ in concert. That’s about it in Salt Lake City – unless you want to walk around town stepping over the outstretched legions of “Urban Nomadic Sommeliers.”

He continued.

“No matter where I went I always carried my small suitcase with me that had all of my clothes and ‘essentials.’ I carried it when I went to hear the choir.”

When he gave me that detail I was lost as to where this was going. He soon filled in the blanks for me.

“As I sat there, waiting for the concert to begin, it got very quiet in the hall. Some people near me began to talk, saying that they could hear something ‘ticking’ and they were afraid that it was a bomb.

“Shortly, an announcement was made that the hall was to be evacuated because of a bomb threat. When I tried to leave I was surrounded by fifteen policemen. They escorted (his word, not mine) me into a room and asked me if I had a bomb in my suitcase. I told them that it was just my alarm clock that was ticking. I had no bomb.

“When I tried to open my suitcase to show them they became agitated and would not let me.”

At this point in his narrative I was laughing – he was not.

Of course, they found only the Good Doctor – To – Be’s Indian-made alarm clock ticking away loudly.

“After they returned my alarm clock I thanked them for the ‘VIP Treatment’ they had given me.”

That was his attempt at wry humor.

“I never did get to hear the choir. They wouldn’t let me back into the hall.”

Life is like that, Doctor.

After all of that my blood pressure was fine, my heart was still beating and he gave me the go-ahead to stay alive for another three months.

As I was leaving I gave him a new adage to think about:

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes you get the ‘VIP Treatment,’ but they still won’t let you back in.”

The Mormon Tabernacle Bomb Scare

WHEN I WENT TO SEE MY DOCTOR yesterday I expected to do most of the talking.

“This feels good, that doesn’t feel good, I’m taking my meds and we’ve been on vacation.”

“I’ve been there.”