“GET the FUCK out of BED!”:

Some people have an alarm clock. Some people have this internal alarm clock that magically wakes them up at the right time everyday. They are never late for work, they always catch the train or the bus and they are sitting at their desks at 9am smiling and ready to go. I am NOT one of these people. I will tell you why. I was stationed onboard one of our nation’s largest aircraft carriers during Desert Storm. A 5000 man floating city, with enough space to house several apartment buildings, a football field and a bowling alley or two. Hell, it had its own mini airport! Guess who slept directly under that airport? You guessed it. My bunk was directly under the main catapult. Some of you may have trouble understanding what this means. Your typical F-14 weighs roughly 76,000 pounds, how powerful would something have to be to propel this piece of machinery off the end of the flight deck at 125 knots (144 mph)? So powerful that when it did this the entire front end of this huge ship would shake like a bowl of Jell-O in a paint mixer. The BAM that the catapult made as it slammed into the front of the ship while launching these aircraft rivaled Emeril Lagassee with a ten thousand watt bull horn. The two together was like a mini nuclear explosion in my sleeping compartment every few minutes. Not normally conducive to favorable sleeping environments. I don’t imagine the people down at MIT studying REM and sleep patterns will often place mini-nukes under their patient’s beds. But I had to learn to sleep through this. And I had to learn to get a good nights rest and wake up feeling refreshed.

And guess what friends? I did. Much to my dismay, I retained the ability to sleep through even the most audibly assaulting, physically abusive situations you can imagine, many years after leaving the service. All forms of abuse save one… The Girlfriend.

Let me paint a picture for you. Let me lead you down the familiar path of peaceful sleep. You know the one I am talking about. The one where you are all stretched out, tucked in under the covers because it’s nice and cozy warm under there, and outside of that safe little environment it is about 40 degrees cooler. You are deep in the middle of one of your most pleasurable dreams of your life, hell, you’d be happy if you never woke up again. When suddenly… unexpectedly… you are absolutely certain that your ears were just impaled with rusty, electrified, barb tipped Ice Picks. Your heart actually stops beating for a minute just so it can ask the brain if everything is all right up there. All of the muscles in your body stiffen in a full on, cave man like, instinctual self-preservation mode. This causes you to rise up a few inches from the mattress, hands and arms outstretched to catch yourself, because now you’re in the air, and falling back to the mattress. You’re immediate concern is to check for blood coming from your ears, but the smiling, disarming face staring at you from the foot of the bed does not coincide with the twisted horror of a face that someone should have if they were staring at you and you looked as bad as you felt right that moment. That, my friends, is how loud I just heard the wonderful words “Get the fuck out of bed”. Allow me to pause for a moment… *deep breath*

You know how when you are going through your day and somewhere in some store, or on someone’s car radio you hear a part of a catchy song? And later on that day you find yourself humming it, or singing it and you can not get it out of your head no matter what you do? Yeah.. that song. Well mine is “Get the fuck out of bed.” How could it not be? I just heard that spoken to me at decibels that would shatter most glass and probably turn the heads of the deaf. Hey, they might not hear it but they could defiantly feel the massive air disturbance caused by her vocal cords. So the words are imprinted in my skull so I can replay them all day long. Isnt that lovely.

At this point the brain responds back to the heart “Yo, yeah its all good up here, sorry we just had quite a scare, all is well.” The heart responds back “Well do you think you could stop sending us all that adrenaline? We are working dangerously close to the death threshold down here and we haven’t even had our morning cigarette or cup of coffee.” …( a slight pause) .. “Oh! Right.. sorry bout that”. And the adrenaline stops. The heart slows back down and the brain, the blessed brain; it does something that is really not all that wise. It responds to the Girlfriend completely autonomous of any direction from “me”. Now when I say this I do not mean to say that my brain is separate from me. But there are times that I do things without thinking, without effort, and without any forethought or afterthought. No thought of consequence, coincidence or otherwise. Its called autopilot, you know you’ve been there. The brain responds to the girlfriend “Ok, I am up, getting up now.” This is a lie.

Lieing is bad...