“All persons who die during this crisis from whatever cause will come back to life to seek human victims, unless their bodies are first disposed of by cremation.” – Night of the Living Dead
This is a test pattern, back from the days before Infomercials. Public Domain.
Sleep and I have always had a rough relationship. As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature movies on Saturday night (the movies STARTED at 11:30PM, after Star Trek reruns were over) I was hooked. I was also in kindergarten, and it was the height of irresponsible behavior for my Grandparents to let me stay up that late, but as long as they could go to bed after Hee-Haw® and the weather forecast, they were happy.
On most Saturday nights when I was a wee Wilder, I would weasel my way to Grandma and Grandpa McWilder’s place because they were so fun to be with. Grandma McWilder would cook me my favorite dinner, and give me money to buy comic books. You’re thinking Archie® and Superman© and X-Men™, right? Sure, I bought plenty of those. But Grandma didn’t seem to care what a five-year-old bought, and the store didn’t seem to care, either.
To be clear, if I went to the store as a five-year-old and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me. I bought issues of National Lampoon in the 1970’s that had . . . NAKED WOMEN in them. And you thought that all people were fully clothed all the time, before the Internet. Not so.
They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though. That’s at least sixth grade.
So I bought:
Creepy and Eerie Magazines – the best in 1970’s black and white cartoon gore:
Nothing unusual here, just a woman holding a disembodied hand close to her chest. Happens every day, most normal thing in the world.
Image owner likely Dark Horse, used under Fair Use (Criticism), but I’ll take it down if they ask.
And, even:
Off-brand magazines like Weird. Which were not as good as Creepy, but made up for it with worse artwork:
No, that’s not “Wired” it’s “Weird.” I’m pretty sure I had this issue, but sadly can’t remember a thing that went on in the comic – I’m sure there must be a reason purple-skull man and the werewolf are killing vampires. Probably a zoning violation?
Image owner unknown and probably hiding, used under Fair Use (Criticism), but I’ll take it down if they ask.
Anyway, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on watching invisible atomic brain monsters (1958’s Fiend Without a Face) get shot and dissolve in a movie that five year old Johnny Wilder thought was really, really good (I give it five blankets over the head!). But most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain could scoff at with ease. Mostly, I’d just watch the giant spider fight the giant radiation enhanced cow and go to bed.
Not a radiation enhanced cow. (Source, Wikimedia, fair use, criticism)
But then, one night they showed Night of the Living Dead. Uncut. Totally uncut, bare butts and all. More importantly, all of the zombie human-eating was in the movie, too. This was certainly the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and only one or two in the future would ever capture the utter dread that this movie brought, along with the calculation that Grandma’s house simply had TOO MANY WINDOWS to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse. Plus, the entire concept was new to me – dead people craving human flesh and actually not going to McDonald’s drive-through, but hunting their own!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! Zombies!
This one is, through an odd twist, likely Public Domain. I’d certainly take it down if Mr. Romero asked me to.
It’s now 1:30AM. Time to go to bed, but I don’t want to walk on the floor because it creaks. That would certainly draw the zombies my direction. I finally get up, and go to the spare bed that’s in Grandma’s bedroom where I normally sleep.
After watching zombies eat living humans my five-year-old brain processed certain facts:
- Dead people might become zombies, and
- Develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
I then recalled:
- Grandma was very old (like 70!), and
- Old people died, and
- She might become a zombie in the middle of the night, and
- I was made of human flesh.
So, if you’ve ever had difficulty sleeping because you thought your wonderful, kindly Grandma might become a zombie and eat you while you were still alive, raise your hand.
Only me?
Anyhow, sleep and I have continued a dubious relationship, and during my life, whenever I could stay up late I certainly did. But, when I was younger, I would never sleep more than eight or so hours at a stretch until going to wrestling camp in high school. One of the other wrestlers would just sleep whenever he could. This was a huge change of perspective for me: I always avoided naps, and had since I was in head start, and would throw blocks at the other kids who were actually good and attempting to sleep like I was supposed to do. Heck, even before they kicked me out of head start I knew that naps weren’t for closers.
So, I discovered naps. What fun! My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drift even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon. But the work happened, 7AM start times, early morning sunlight.
The break of dawn. Ewwww.
At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes. And, I hear that’s not really good for me unless, that heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes are good things. WebMD.com says that those things are really not good for me. Web MD further states that it can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and (eek), make me die earlier.
That sounds negative, which makes me wonder how did Edison get by on a steady schedule of only four hours of sleep a night? Well, apparently he did a lot of napping, which must not have counted. But he really did get by on less sleep than 8 a night. A lot less. And a host of famous people have gotten by with less, even though WebMD says they’re all going to die next week.
I have been pushing it too much recently, though. Since restarting the blog, I spend about nine to twelve hours a week on it, prepping, researching, writing, editing and publishing, and so far I’ve taken that time out of sleep, rather than other pursuits.
I’ve started graphing my sleep, and so far I’ve added about five hours a week back, during the weekdays, where I’d sometimes been getting less than four a night.
One thing I’ve noted when I go to bed early, is I wake up after that four hours, and sometimes have difficulty getting back to sleep – so I’ve begun taking a little melatonin prior to going to bed. It’s literally a little, 1 milligram – The Mrs. takes about 10 milligrams, I think, and calls me a lightweight.
So, if you’re up too late and can’t sleep, here’s a copy of Fiend Without a Face, courtesy of YouTube – I hear a remake is coming, but you can enjoy the cheesy effects, especially about one hour and seven minutes into the movie . . .
Just make sure that you have a contingency plan in place to take care of Granny if she goes zombie on you . . .
Note: JOHN WILDER IS NOT A DOCTOR. Please don’t do anything unless you’ve talked it over with a large stable of professionals, like your actual doctor.
