Like a Log

I live in a house of sound sleepers. My wife, my daughter, the cats -- any of them can fall asleep anywhere, anytime, pretty much on command. (My wife did have one notable exception, on the night train from Rome to Venice, but that's it as far as I know.) Not me. I have an inaccessible volume control on my heart that causes it, at the most inopportune times, to beat incredibly loudly. So loud that, in fact, I'm sure it would wake my wife if she weren't the aforementioned sound sleeper. I wind up going for very long stretches with not an awful lot of sleep, which probably adds a bit of irony to this pre-coffee blog. Coffee is either the last thing I need or the thing of which I need the most, depending on how you look at it.

So I sleep-walk through life. Which, I suspect, brings me into line with most of the rest of American society. I used to see the business types, out for lunch, drinking something alcoholic. Whether it was the famous three-martini lunch or something else, I was always floored. I'd have to take a nap after a single martini. After two, I'd probably make an inappropriate suggestion to my boss. And three? That might explain a lot. If you assume that some large percentage of upper management is flat-out plastered most of the time, you begin to understand how every single automaker in the United States (and that's a grand total of two, ever since Chrysler became a German company) has managed to go from the top of the world to the trash heap.

But, you know, we reward the leadership of these companies with huge payouts, so I guess somebody must be doing something right. Or, perhaps, the rest of us just haven't gotten any sleep and we're too tired to notice. All, that is, except for my wife and daughter and cats. And they ought to be doing something about this, don't you think?