Regular readers of this column (both of you) are aware of a certain peculiarity of my life : because of my weird relationship with sleep, every now and then I have a “sleepy day” where I sleep all days and the dreams are so intense that it really fries my poor overworked noodle.

Well today was one of those days, and brother, it’s a lulu.

I have already slept for around eleven hours this calendar day and I am still pretty damned sleepy. The moment I finish this column, I am going right back to bed. Who knows, maybe I will sleep all the way into tomorrow.

These sleepy periods suck. largely because the waking periods are so unpleasant. I wake up soaked in sweat and completely incoherent. As in, “it takes me some time to remember who I am” kind of incoherent. It always feels like I have just dragged myself ashore from nearly drowning in a turgid and turbulent sea.

And that would not be so bad if I didn’t have things I have to do, chief among them writing this column and that funny little human ritual called eating.

And acts of elimination, of course.

So I have to rise from my grave and stumble around the apartment like a sleepwalking zombie and perform the suddenly extremely complex seeming tasks of eating and using the bathroom and watching something on Netflix. It is very stressful, and so I start feeling angry and resentful to go with being merely incoherent.

Yhis, obviously, does not actually help.

I shudder to think of what it would be like to be my husband when I get into this state. I feel lucky that I almost always have the apartment to myself when this occurs, thus sparing me the intolerable complexity of actually interacting with people.

Thus, my crankiness never goes anywhere. It passes through me like a cloud passes through the night sky. But if someone else was around and tried to interact with me, and didn’t realize I was in a bad mental state, I might well end up getting pretty angry with them because I just want to get back to sleep.

Something to consider should the impossible happen and I actually find myself in a relationship.

The state of really needing to go to sleep is one of those rare instances where all my mellow equanimity leaves me and I am just a raw and surly animal. Normally, I am not a cranky fellow. But wjem I really need sleep and something (usually someONE) is getting in my way, I will do almost anything to get rid of them.

I remember one night in particular. My brother and I had just been in a workshop style play and we were at the cast party. My friend Clark Wasnidge had also been part of it and he was there.

There was vodka. There was mixers. It was college. I got pretty damned drunk.

My buddy Clark, on the other hand, got way WAY WAY drunk. Way past sloppy falling-down drunk and into “end game” drunk where your conscious mind is just plain not in attendance. There was much vomiting (in the theater’s bathroom, thank ye gods) and screaming and incoherent speech.

He was as fucked up as you can be without dying of alcohol poisoning, is what I am saying.

And who was it that had to be there with Clark in the bathroom to keep him from dying via inhaled ejecta? None other than my poor brother David. I was too drunk to do it. And Clark did not have any other friends around.

The best I could manage was to sit outside the door of the bathroom and warn people going in that something really drunk and disgusting was happening in there. And that was fine while I was still drunk.

But eventually, the booze started to wear off, and the thing about that is that while I do not pass out from drinking, there is always a point when I start getting really sleepy and the “find a place to sleep now” mode in my mental hardware gets activated.

So it’s kind of like passing out, but with a grace period.

Back to the Bathroom of Clark’s Doom. At a certain point, I realize some very bad things.

1. I am sobering up and need to get to sleep SOON.
2. The party has ended while we were looking after Clark, meaning I missed most of it. (Grr.)
3. The party being over means the entire cast is gone and we are alone in the theater.
4. This was the fall semester play and ergo it is the middle of December, and back home on PEI, that means were two months into winter.
5. Add in the fact that it’s been dark out for hours by this point, and you realize it is very cold out.
6. The entire cast being gone means there is no longer anyone to give us a ride home.

And that all leads to the really bad one,

7. We now have to walk around twenty five blocks up Queen Street to get home.
7b. With a stumbling and incoherent (and presumably very empty) Clark in tow.

This put me into grumpy mode pretty damned fast, and to my eternal shame, I am pretty sure I complained to my brother Dave about it the entire way home.

My brother who was busy keeping Clark from passing out in a snowbank or pissing on anyone’s shrubbery.

That was definitely one of the worst nights of my life. I feel very guilty about making my brother’s life even more difficult by bitching at him the whole walk home while he was being a saint looking after Clark.

It does make for a fairly decent anecdote, though, so there’s that. Great for when everyone is telling stories about their drunken misadventures.

Well kids, time for me to go back to bed. I feel a lot better now than I did earlier, but I still need some more rack time in order to actually catch up.

Seeya tomorrow, folks.