Bed, Perchance to Sleep...

I slept for shit last night.

I don't know why. My wife and I were at my mother and father's for dinner last night. The event commenced, as it is ordained so to do, at 5:30 and, by 7:20, we were both nodding off at the table.

"Jesus Christ," I hazily exclaimed after looking at my watch, "it's only 7:20?"

"So?" my mother dared me to proceed with further commentary.

"Well, come on," I slurred, "it's like a fucking opium den in here. Look at her," I said, gesturing lazily to my wife, "she can barely keep her head up."

My wife, almost cross-eyed, enthusiastically bobbed her head up and down, presumably in agreement.

I don't know what it is about my parent's house that is so soporific, but you can't be in there for longer than an hour and a half without your brain turning into a gray slushie. It's not like the conversation isn't lively-- it is-- last night we were conversing energetically about safety recalls of the pack-n-play my mother bought for my sister, my father was trying to harrass me into accepting a re-gift of a Continental Airlines credit-card holder ("The Israeli ambassador gave it to me! It's Italian leather, mummy-- beautiful!") while my eldest sister was giving my wife meticulous directions to the gynecologist's office in New Jersey. I mean, it's a pretty festive fucking environment.

I ended up not accepting the credit-card holder, regardless of its alleged quality and provenance. "How many credit cards do you think I have, for God's sake?" I asked. This thing was made for big boys. It even had a slot for a passport, with a piece of paper in it made to look like a passport, and a long, vertical slot for an airline ticket, with a fake airline ticket inside for "HAPPY AIRLINE." Can you just picture the flight attendants on Happy Airline?

My father is always trying to give me shit I don't want-- coupons to Ruby Tuesday ("Take your wife out for dinner, for God's sake-- it's beautiful!"), supermarket coupons, "Sveetie-- you won' believe this-- 2 liter bottles of Pepsi Diet for 89 cents each! I mean, fuck!") or random food products they have lying around the house that they can't wait to get rid of ("Mummy-- you like sunflower seeds, right?") but it's usually fruit.

Yesterday, we managed to escape with only half a watermelon, which we had to carry home in a bag as we walked to their house. It's a pleasant enough walk, though when encumbered with half a watermelon, it's decidedly less so. I don't know how serial killers or mafioso walk around with severed heads in bowling ball bags all the time.

I guess we should have gone to sleep immediately after arriving home from their house, but we stayed up for another three hours and while this should have only increased my thirst for sleep, I instead got totally wired. As I lay in bed, my wife instantly asleep after a back rub, my mind wandered to the following topics:

Everything I did wrong this weekend including, but not limited to,

# hitting my head a total of four (4) times

# breaking a shelf my father-in-law hand-made for us five years ago

# breaking a large lamp bulb in the kitchen (by hitting my head on it-- #2 out of 4)

* being unprepared for work today

* all the bills that have been paid/have to be paid

* obsessing about our mortgage and its seeming unendingness

* ditto on school loans

* the many ways someone could easily break into our house

* the fact that I sleep naked in the summer and how stupid I would look confronting a burglar in such aforementioned nudity and how my only shot at not getting killed would be that the burglar would probably laugh so hard at my emaciated form that he might drop his gun.

* thinking about death

* thinking about Michael Jackson's death

* considering a myriad of snappy combacks I'd love to say to people, especially my boss

* obsessing about why I can't fall asleep

I must have fallen asleep for at least a little bit, because I know I had a dream about my father promising to buy my a vintage Volkswagen Beetle (something he already did for me when I was fourteen-- and I ended up selling it at age 15-and-a-half because I was too scared to drive it due to its lack of safety features, like, um, shoulder belts). The dream, of course, didn't go well, and ended with me yelling at him because he didn't understand that Volkswagen stopped making the original Beetle in the year 1979 and that I was only interested in Beetles from 1962-1967, but that I wanted to test-drive "a later model just to be sure."

"You mean like 1995 or 1996?"

"NO, GODDAMNIT! THEY WEREN'T MAKING THEM THAT LATE!"

"You mean like 1991 or 1992?"

"AAAAAAAAH! NO! WHAT THE FUCK! I MEAN, LIKE, 1968 to 1971! JESUS!"

"Oh. So, like 1989 or something."

My poor father. We are destined to be unable to communicate, even in my dreams. My very brief, unsatisfied, unkind, unrequited dreams. Oh well. There's always tonight. Maybe, instead of our marital bed, I can try sleeping at my parent's dining room table. It's a good thing I don't see a therapist anymore, or he might call that a disturbing bit of regression.