I am an insomniac. I toss and I turn and before I know it the alarm is going off letting me know another day has arrived. There are some nights I even feel lucky to get a couple of hours of sleep and there are several reasons for this. One is I am the lightest sleeper on the planet. If a rabbit walks by outside my window I jump to attention and if the sun is up, I can forget any kind of sleep. Not to mention the snoring of my wife and animals that could keep even the deepest sleepers up.
But my main reason I am such an insomniac is I am what I call a "bed thinker." I can go an entire day without thinking (and many people, my wife included, can verify this) but when my head hits the pillow my brain begins to work overtime.
I will lay in bed thinking about my screw-ups at work and all of the things I put off that will have to be done the next day. I will replay every error I made in a softball game over and over and I will rack my brain trying to come up with ideas for these pitiful columns.
When I have nothing else normal to think about though, I start thinking about idiotic things. Take last night for example. Trying to come up with an idea for a column I was running things over and over in my mind. Somehow, someway, my warped brain comes up with a question: If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2?
About now many of you are thinking I am on drugs, but really I'm not. My brain actually came up with that and then in my tired state, I thought it would be funny to come up with some others. Such as:
Why don't psychics ever win the lottery?
Speaking of psychics, why do they keep sending me spam e-mail when they know I'm not interested?
If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?
If the shortest distance between two points is a line, why does waiting in one take so long?
If we don't say "Amen" does God keep listening?
On the subject of God, if you are in heaven, are you stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?
Why is it called the Afterlife when it is really Afterdeath?
If heat rises shouldn't Hell be cold?
If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?
Do fish get thirsty?
Why do stores have "no shoplifting" signs? Are there places where it is OK to shoplift?
If sandwich bread is square then why do they make lunch meat round?
Babies wake up all during the night so why do we say "sleep like a baby?"
And I could go on. As a matter of fact my brain will. It will go on all night until that stinking alarm clock goes off in the morning. Then my brain, which clearly isn't an insomniac, will go to sleep until I hit the pillow again.
A lot of people tell me I need to get some sleeping pills or drink some alcohol before I go to sleep, but do you really want me drugged up or drunk? I mean look at what my brain does to me sober.
Who knows, maybe one night in my tossing and turning I will figure out a cure for cancer or actually come up with a decent idea for a column. In the meantime I will just have to settle for these strange questions popping into my head at random. Or maybe I'll just run out of questions and finally fall asleep. If I could just get that dang rabbit out of the yard.