Ins0mni@

It’s cool, when you’re old and crusty like me, to fall asleep in your chair, or the couch, or the toilet, or the bus seat, or wherever you happen to stop moving long enough for your eyes to go, “Hey! We haven’t been together for 10 or 12 hours! Time to seal!” This is a decidedly man type of thing to do. I remember being at my great uncles home, watching him snore in his favorite recliner with the TV up to the maximum volume. I also used to laugh at my own father for this (one of many, many things I also do now). In the midst of my ritual of fighting sleep, then dozing off, then jumping awake at any sound, my wife often asks me, “Why don’t you just go to bed?” “Because I’m a man! That’s why!” I respond, to myself, because that’s not a really good reason.

A few years ago, at around 10:30, I fell asleep for about 20 minutes. Some people call this a “cat nap” or “power nap.” To me, they shall ever be called, “Short Nap, Depriver of True Sleep.” In addition to the short nap, I also consumed 45 gallons of tea while eating with friends a few hours earlier. The result? After lying in my bed for what felt like 6 days, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, tossing and also turning, and staring at my phone hoping that someone else’s life on Facebook would bore me to sleep, I got back up and went to watch TV. I don’t know what it is about humans, especially male humans, that thinks staring at some sort of glowing electronic box, a box shooting photons and electrons and also infomercials at our weary eyeballs, will coax us into sleep, but we’re convinced. So I watch Netflix, play some games, surf the internet, all the while expecting some magical sleep fairy to break into my house and hit me with the sleepy stick. That eventually happened, around 3AM.

The only trouble with going to bed late is that, like most aging fellows, I routinely wake up between 6:30-7:00 am. The reason for this is simple. It is due to a legitimate scientific phenomenon called “I Have to Pee and the Dog Needs to Go Outside OK Now I’m Up.” Our dog at the time shared many qualities with me, namely, nature calls at the same time every morning. However, I do not (typically) run back inside and immediately run around the house, bouncing around like I’ve never seen the place before. I don’t you want to be confused and think that I’m some sort of up-and-at-’em, early-bird-gets-the-worm, hard-charging morning person. I am a morning person in the summer and on weekends and holidays when I am not required to get up early. When it is required of me to wake up early, I morph into a bed-loving, sleep-yearning, eyes-pasted-shut kind of dude, in need of copious amounts of coffee or some other caffeine-containing substance, preferably poured directly into my veins.

One of my goals in life is to become one of those ol’ lovable curmudgeons that sit in McDonald’s or Hardee’s at 5:30 in the morning, drinking their cheap or free coffee and complaining about “kids these days.” I look forward to grimacing and turning away when some young whipper-snapper tries to nod and say hello to me. I mean, really. You kids just take it all for granted. Back in my day, we only had a smartphone and a tablet and a computer at home! We didn’t have Google Apple Microsoft brain chips to post our every thought onto Facebook. We did that with our GOD GIVEN THUMBS. Look at me while I’m texting you!

Which brings me back to my original point. I’m up late again, this time because I dozed off (again) and then the dogs decided, “Hey! Let’s play in the bed while the woman is trying to sleep!” And that, in turned caused my very hard working wife to wake up and send the dogs into the living room with me, where they proceeded to run around like little hyper maniacs at 1 am.

But I’m not complaining. Because I’m a man, and men don’t complain. Except to other men. At McDonald’s.