Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Awake, Asleep
Thursday
January 3, 2008
"At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn"
-Geto Boys "My Mind Playing Tricks On Me"
Insomnia reigns supreme. It's 5:05 a.m. CST right now as I type this. If I could have found some of the sleeping pills I've kept since my days working the overnight shift in TV news, perhaps I would be snoozing right now. No dice, not on the pills or the sleep. So here I am.
Normally I take a Tizanidine pill (muscle spasm medicine) before I go to bed, and that stuff is usually a knockout punch, a regular KENTA Go 2 Sleep maneuver. Unfortunately, I've apparently built up enough of a tolerance to at least the sleep-oriented nature of The Tiz that it's now virtually ineffective at sending me to sleep, kind of like what happened to me with Baclofen.
If there's an upside, it's that I don't have anywhere that I have to be tomorrow, no time constraints or start times to worry with. Not like my bro Matt and my friend Dustin (my two roommates), who are both asleep downstairs on the two couches by the big HDTV. This is an odd phenomenon that I've experienced here, the whole falling asleep on the downstairs couch thing.
Now I've been guilty of dozing off on the couch before, though I can only think of one (or maybe two) times that I've spent the night on the couch since I moved here. It's just not my thing.
Besides, falling asleep on the couch can leave you prone to horrible things, like what Dustin did last month when I dozed off and he took a bottle of pickles out of the fridge and took a pic of me sleeping next to it. I hate pickles, which naturally is grounds for ballbusting in this dojo. Matt hates V8 and the term "Hi-Def", so Dustin and I hit him with that as much as possible. Dustin despises mustard and tuna fish, so he gets the business about that. Oh, and spiders. He hates spiders like I hate wasps.
For the sake of disclosure, I did snap a pic of Dustin asleep on the couch with his hand down his pants and posted it on his MySpace page prior to the pickle picture, so it's not like I'm an innocent bystander.
Because my writing on here has been so sporadic as of late, here is a quick update from my life:
-Yesterday, Draft King broke its single-day record for most visitors, a whopping 81,028. That blew away the old record of 66,225 set on 4/20/2005, just days before the 2005 NFL Draft. Clearly, putting a full-time effort into the site has paid dividends. If I can keep it up, I just might end up making this thing work.
-It was very nice to have Christmas in town and not have to drive (or fly) in from elsewhere to enjoy it. Holiday travel is a bitch to deal with, between crowded airport lobby areas and long lines to busy roads and ballbuster cops who watch traffic in spots with a tenacity that would make the Soviet Era KGB proud.
-Memphis really deserves its own column. The Liberty Bowl was a great time, particularly with Mississippi State beating USF 10-3 on a touchdown with less than two minutes to go. The upside: Memphis is a cool city that's always fun to visit. The downside: it drained me far too close to New Year's.
-Speaking of New Year's, I decided to stay at the house rather than pay $50 (plus inflated drink prices) to hit downtown. The peer pressure to go was enormous, but between my legit exhaustion from the trip and my inability to squelch my enochlophobia (fear of crowds) for long periods of time, I managed to beg off without catching too much hell for it. Eventually the crew came back ,and I ended up talking with Carlin, one of the girls who was part of the evening, until 5:30 a.m.
-Upon further review, maybe that has something to do with my insomnia. Or, if not insomnia, my time-shifted sleep schedule. Ugh.
Today I thought that my RCA Superadio had died on me... but then I discovered that it had run out of battery juice. The thing runs on six D batteries, which helps it last a long time, and it was the first time since I bought it that the batteries have run out. Something else to get at the store later today, I suppose. But to get to the store, I have to get to sleep now. Attempt number 4 or 5 or whatever, coming up.
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