Sleep alludes me.
Another words, let me put it this way.
There comes a time in all of our lives when the malaprops fly. The key is to figure out when they’ve been launched on porpoise.
At the time of this writing, it’s 3:36 am on a Saturday in the middle of June and I can’t sleep. The last time I was tormented by a lack of sleep, it was because I was preparing for a rectal assault.
Being the way that I am, the hardwiring which I can only hope is neatly coiled up within the confines of my skull has spent the last hour or so running various scenarios in a desperate effort to determine why in Tar Nation the Enter Sandman protocol has failed to properly execute.
Near as I can tell, there are two very strong candidates in the running. One of those candidates has used some troubling imagery I encountered about 14 hours ago to keep a white knuckled grasp of my consciousness.
Yeah, I skipped the obvious malaprop there because I hate trying to spell either of those words.
The other reason I come to you in the middle of the night is due to a physical manifestation which presented itself to me the other day as an admonishment that I need to abandon any inclination to take care of a repair issue by myself and let the professionals handle things.
Hang on a minute. I’ve got to go take a picture of said admonishment so as to provide a visual aid.
I’ll be right back.
*pauses for effect*
Okay, I’m back.
For the most part, I’ve dodged some bullets in my time here on Earth, and have maintained a pretty straight forward existence without the trappings of having a bunch of hanging curveballs smeared in Vaseline thrown at me. Married life is good. The kids have gotten through their formative years without causing us any real problems. My employment has been fruitful and consistent. Whatever demons I may possess have been pretty much kept in check. To date, there are exactly two physical ailments which occasionally give me any real reason to pause.
The first ailment is an ankle injury I sustained when I was twenty while playing basketball.
Stand by, I need to verify whether I’ve eluded to this injury before.
Don’t worry too much about the malaprop there. After all, sleep continues to allude me.
It looks like I mentioned the injury once on a trip to the beach several years ago, but I didn’t go into details.
Honestly, that whole thing baffles me because I’m not one to play a whole lot of basketball. I barely watch it anymore. Just to drive that home, every time I type the name of that sport, the mechanical memory in my stubby typing digits automatically types ‘baseball’.
Regardless, I got involved in a one on one game once when I was 20. In the process, I twisted my ankle something nasty that day. Thirty years later (geez it’s been that long), I periodically experience the same pain in that ankle.
The other injury involves one of my ribs.
Certainly you remember my discussion about how I hurt my rib on the toilet seat on the day I turned 40. Well ladies and gentlemen, that particular injury is back. This time it wasn’t caused by me leaning over a toilet, or even any real ill-advised application of pressure to the area in question.
Instead, the pain arrived this last Wednesday when I fell off of a ladder.
Backwards.
I was coming down a ladder, my foot slipped, and I fell backwards.
I landed on my feet.
In the process, I must have jarred, jostled, and generally irritated the old injury because it started hurting again.
Like a mutha.
Since then, I haven’t been able to sleep on either of my sides, which is the way I sleep most effectively and free of errors.
Dagnabbit.
The reason I was even on the ladder in the first place was because one of my gutters emancipated itself from the house last weekend. In the process of assessing the damage and whether I was going to pursue fixing it myself or hiring someone to do it, I climbed up on a ladder and subsequently initiated a series of events that would leave me a little sleep deprived for the next few days.
I just remembered that the whole world is going ga-ga over the World Cup as of late. Maybe watching soccer will help put me to sleep.
All things being equal, I would rather the re-inflammation of this injury be the primary reason on why I can’t sleep as of late.
The other reason I’ve pondered would imply that at the ripening old age of 50, I have a delicate psyche which doesn’t have the ability to process troubling imagery as well as it should.
Authors note: Okay people, it’s now 8:30 am on the same Saturday morning. Once I got to this point in today’s forthcoming dispatch to an otherwise dull internet, I paused my little first world issue of occasional insomnia and proceeded to watch some stuff on Netflix for a while. After dozing a little through whatever the hell it was I was watching, I took advantage of the significant diminishment of rib pain and initiated ‘Freak on a leash, Bitch on a clicker’. Faith was quite happy with this, as it’s been a few days since I’ve taken her for a walk.
As I returned to the posting and read the ramblings of the irritated and sleepy version of myself, I couldn’t help but marvel at my ability in that particular state to belt out an effective use of malaprops in the manner that I did.
Now that I’ve injured my rotator cuff patting myself on the back, I’ll return you to today’s post, already in progress.
So just to set the backdrop here, you should know that I work in a large office building where the dress code is documented as professional casual. That means we can where denim and a respectable shirt that doesn’t announce to the literate among us that we’re with stupid. T-shirts are generally frowned upon, so as such I tend to leave the sleeveless displays of patriotism at home in favor of something with buttons and a collar.
Reasonable footwear is expected too, however that memo managed to escape the gentleman I saw a few weeks ago wearing a button-up long sleeved shirt, dress slacks, and bare tootsies placed lovingly in a pair of sandals. Dude was easily 10 years my senior.
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.
Naturally, I wish I could leave it at that.
Here in the dawn of the 21st century where the trend in big business is to promote diversity and inclusion to the point where segregation and exclusion reigns supreme, it’s only natural that we’re expected to break our unconscious bias and tolerate the occasional display of poor decision making. “Thank you sir for showing me your hammer toes. It really makes that fungus pop. I can only hope that my exposure to your condition makes me a better business analyst in the grand scheme of things.”
Bravo.
Sierra.
I wish it stopped there, but it didn’t.
There comes a point in our lives where the existence of cameras in our personal cellular devices comes in handy to capture a momentous occasion. At the same time, don’t be jumping the damn shark with the desire or the need to take a picture of every damn goofy thing you see.
Because if you do…….
If you do, you’ll have a picture on your phone of some bushy haired (skull and face) dude standing at the middle urinal committing a faux pas in the etiquette which dictates that one of the outside devices should have been selected.
But that’s not the reason you felt inspired to take the picture in the first place.
No.
The reason you want to pop out your phone and post it to the internet under the tag of #whatintarnation is because this dude is wearing a Metallica concert t-shirt. You know this because the band’s name is on the top half of the back of the shirt that you can see. The bottom half of the shirt is pulled up about half way to reveal that treasure trail of back hair that leads down into his ass. The shirt is pulled forward a little, and upon further inspection you see that the front of the shirt is being pulled and held up by that portion that’s been placed between his teeth.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you see a grown man standing at the urinal with his t-shirt pulled halfway up his torso in the same manner a 6 year old boy does, don’t take a picture of it.
It’s already an image you won’t be able to un-see anytime soon. Add to that the fact that no matter how well adjusted you may be, a sleepless night or two may be on order until the 24 hour news cycle can conjure up some other strategically timed bullshit to insure that sleep continues to allude you.
