(Tornado is out out town so I’m filling in for him. Don’t worry, he’ll be back soon!)

It’s about four in the morning as I write this. Not to be presumptuous but I would venture to guess that you are warm and experiencing anything from partial-comfort to full-comfort. Assuming that you have both of your arms, I think that it is fair to say that at this time one of those arms may be slightly colder than the other, perhaps little tingly, or possibly even numb. Maybe you have an extra pillow that you don’t place under your head. Maybe this pillow is strategically placed somewhere else, thus adding to your level of comfort. Maybe you are dribbling on your pillow a little. It’s okay to dribble. I dribble quite often, and it does occur mostly in my sleep. I think that this is one of the reasons why I can’t fall asleep in cars or planes or any other places where people might be awake and/or bored.

The reason that I wrote “this is one of the reasons…” ten seconds ago is because there is more than one reason affecting my sleepless travel. Another reason would be that cars are never comfortable to sleep in, no matter how far back the seat goes.

Yet another troubler occurred the first time I heard the pop song that goes:

“I hear, the secrets that you keep, when you’re talkin’ in your sleep…”.
To think about that lyric when you are very young can be quite stressful. It’s bad enough to think that in a deep sleep you might churn out unpleasant facts about yourself, but what if these things are not even true secrets? What if you say some odd phrase from a dream and it is heard and misinterpreted by non-sleepers? What if I say something like “More peanuts!”?
People might start to think that I really enjoy peanuts and put peanuts in my food…but the fact is this:
I DO NOT LIKE PEANUTS IN MY FOOD!

It is ridiculous to worry about telling secrets while sleeping, I know it. Never-the-less, it is a concern of mine on road trips. This brings me back to the topic of sleepless travel of which I know quite well. So well in fact, that due to lack of sleep I have had a few vivid hallucinations on longer journeys. I imagine that these hallucinations are similar to what some Native Americans might have pursued and considered a right of passage a long time ago. Similar yes, except that they called them “visions” and not hallucinations. Also, they would have walked into the wilderness instead of just driving through it.

There is a benefit though. As a non-sleeper I make a great co-pilot, ask anybody. I won’t leave you hanging while you are driving home from San Francisco at three-thirty in the morning through the snow. I’ll be awake. I promise. That means that I’ll be the natural choice to help you attach the chains that you have never used to your tires. Considering of course, that you don’t want to pay the “I Know What you did last Summer” looking man in the yellow rubber jacket eighty dollars to do it for you.

You were there just like me but I’ll still go on about how the singer was ironing his shirt on stage, or how you could feel the floor of the venue flex up and down as the crowd jumped around, or how the drummer smashed his kit at the end of the second-to-last-song and had to ask the crowd for his bass drum pedal back so they could finish the set. I’ll also probably talk a lot about some recording I just found. Inevitably, this conversation will start when you put on an exciting new recording that you just found. This conversation will continue until your record is over, no matter how loudly you play it. And then, mine goes on, because friends get to share the cd player. Right?

But I always find that on road trips, good company is important.
Just like a good night’s sleep…

this link reminded me of every road trip ever.
(it works better if you start from the left.)