Sleep? That’s for the weak.

“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

Also, remember that sleep is no substitute for caffeine.

Sleep and I have always had a rocky relationship.  If I were married to Sleep, Sleep would have filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment.  For most people, this starts at an early age, but for me it started when I was a very young John Wilder, at around the age of five.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m adopted, but it’s the kind of adoption that involves family members.  The ones that were closest to me before the adoption were Grandma and Grandpa McWilder.  To me they seemed astonishingly old, even though they were in their late sixties when I toddled into their lives at the age of five.

All five year old children are difficult.  I think I was more difficult than most – I found where the electricity entered their house, above a window.  How difficult was I?  I grabbed the bare wires coming in with one hand.   After I got shocked, what did I do?  Grabbed it again.  I was a high maintenance.

But the benefit of being with a grandparent is the word “no” is generally a foreign word to their vocabulary.  I recall discovering that Star Trek® would be on after the news on Saturday.  So, I stayed up to watch it.  Grandma and Grandpa McWilder had already gone to bed, having watched the weather.

Now, I have no idea why they were so concerned about the weather.  They didn’t farm, they didn’t really do anything that would require them to be concerned about the weather, but they watched it every night.  Me?  For the most part (there are exceptions) I don’t worry much about the weather – you can’t change it after all, unless you’re a sixteen year old girl from Sweden.

After Captain Kirk® had finished gallivanting around the galaxy at 11:30pm, I still wasn’t tired.  What was next?  Creepy Creature Feature.  As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature, I was hooked.

What was Creepy Creature Feature?  It was a pair of science fiction and/or horror movies, most of which were black and white.  These were generally not what anyone today would call good movies – the special effects in most of them involved foam rubber, chocolate syrup, and someone imagining what George Soros’ face would look like in 2020.

This wasn’t the logo my local station used, but you get the idea.

Okay, why on Earth would such wonderful people have such poor judgement as to allow a five-year-old to watch horror movies deep into the night?

Let me explain how I was treated when I visited Grandma and Grandpa:

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.

This was a far different time and place than today.  If I went to the local drugstore and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me.  Five year old me.  And they would have asked if I needed matches.  While at the drugstore I bought issues of National Lampoon® that had mostly naked women in them.  And while you may have thought that all people were fully clothed all the time before the Internet, I can assure you that it was not so.

They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though.  You had to at least be in sixth grade for hard alcohol.  Beer?  Heck, that’s practically water.

So I bought magazines like this:

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.

And the drugstore even sold off-brand magazines like Weird™.  These didn’t tell stories as polished as Creepy©, but made up for it with artwork that looked like it was done by crack addicted chihuahuas with an unlimited supply of crayons:

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 California zoning enforcement officers?

Anyway, given that I had Creepy® and Weird© magazines around the house, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on after the television station finished watching invisible atomic brain monsters in 1958’s Fiend Without a Face© get shot by a .45ACP and then dissolve.  When I was five, I thought it was really, really good.  When I reviewed it, I seem to recall that I gave it five blankets over the head.

Thankfully, most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain wasn’t scared because there was no way that these monsters were real.  Mostly, I’d just watch the giant radiation-enhanced spider fight the giant radiation-enhanced cow and then go to bed.

Not a radiation enhanced cow.

But then one night they showed Night of the Living Dead.  Uncut.  Totally uncut – bare butts and all.  More importantly, all of the zombies eating uncooked (and cooked) humans 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 certainty that Grandma’s house simply had too many windows to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse.  Plus, being five, the entire concept of zombies was new to me.  Dead people craving the first take-out food:  people.

Zombies don’t eat brains with their fingers.  They eat fingers as an appetizer.

After the movie is over, it’s 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.
• Zombies develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
• Grandma was very old.
• Old people sometimes die.
• Therefore, Grandma 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?

I’m not sure that I slept at all that night.

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 and  I always avoided naps.  When I was in head start, I 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.

Eventually I got older and I discovered that I really liked naps.  What fun!  My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drifted even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon.  But after graduating from college, work happened. Work started at 7:00AM, and I had to see early morning sunlight.

The break of dawn.  Beautiful, you say?  Not to me – if I want to see a beautiful sunrise, I can look one up on the Internet.

At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes.  And, WebMD© says that weird sleep patterns are not really good for me unless you call heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes good things.  The Internet further states that not enough sleep can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and make me die earlier.

I slept great last night!  I got a full 73 minutes!

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.

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 1950’s era 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 . . .

This is a revamp of an earlier post from when the blog was just starting.  I like this newer version better.