How Not To Dad - Episode 9: Mine-craft

    "Why did you put that there? You're destroying the house! I just built that."

    "Fine, if I can't put that there I'll go build my own and you won't be invited!"

    “You’ve already taken over this one. Somehow the living room is now a stable with two horses in it. There are twenty dogs in my bedroom.  There are twenty beds in my bedroom.   And why are all these parrots in cages?  I can’t even walk through the place.  You stay here and do what you want, and I’ll go build another house.”

The main area of Logan Land.  It's a bit chaotic, but it has
 it's charms.

    “But I want to come too!”

    “Okay, but this one’s gonna be mine okay?  You have to build it like I say.”

    Two blocky characters hop and trot through a similarly blocky world, away from the jumble of blocky glass and blocky stone and blocky dirt.  In a way the world resembles a 3D, open world version of the original Super Mario Bros. game, minus the giant green pipes. The two characters choose a spot on a hill, and one begins clearing blocks so that the surface is flat.  While he’s doing that, the other one begins to build about three feet from him.

    “What are you doing?”

    “I’m building a clubhouse.”

    “I don’t want a clubhouse.”

    “This is my part of the house.”

    “But I said this is my area and you have to build it like I want.”

    “This isn’t on your property. This is on my land beside yours. I’m building a clubhouse.”

    “Okay well if you’re gonna do that I’m gonna make changes to it when you’re not playing.”

    “Why would you do that?!  That’s not fair!”

    “Well it’s not fair that you’re building on my land either, is it?”

    “But I’m on my land!”

    “You know what? Fine. Build the clubhouse. But you can’t build in my house.”

    A few minutes pass.  The foundation of the house is completed, and the character that is building the house begins setting rows of blocks that will become walls.  The second character, having completed his clubhouse just a few Minecraft blocks away, wants something else to do.  So he climbs down from his elevated clubhouse and hops onto the flat surface of the foundation that character #1 has been clearing for thirty minutes. 

    He begins digging.

    “What are you doing?” 

    “I’m building a basement.”

    “I don’t recall asking for a basement.”

    “It needs a basement, and that will be my part of the house.”

    “But this is my house!”

    “Not all of it! Some of it needs to be mine!”

    And the cycle repeats.

My house in the center, with an unplanned basement
beneath (unseen) and a wooden clubhouse with random white
sticks littering the base, and apparently a light show going
on behind the house.

    Does any other adult ever hear themselves argue with their child and realize that their mental and emotional capacity shrinks to match that of the six-year-old boy with whom they’re arguing? By now it’s probably evident that this exchange is happening between my son and me. We’ve played Minecraft together off and on for at least two years now I’d guess, and we always have fun.  We do not, however, always get along. And I’ll be damned if I don’t revert to a whiny little bitch when I can’t build this fictional house on a glorified child’s game to my exact structural and architectural specifications.

    The worst part about this, I always realize later, is that my son is wanting to play with me right then.  This is potential for some good quality time I'll have with him, time that won't last forever.  How many more years will I have of him destroying what I built in that game before he decides he's too cool to play Minecraft anymore?  Will I still turn the game on and stroll through our Frankenstein monster of a house after he's given up playing it?  I suspect there will be a time in the not too distant future when I'll be begging my boy to build a stupid room to house his towers of caged parrots and stalls of skeleton horses and potion-making tables.   I mean, who doesn't want a world with a house built like a giant chicken with a doorway for an ass?

Logan's "chicken house."  The butt's the doorway.  I do like this one a lot.

Moral of the Story: Let the kid build the ridiculous room onto your playhouse, you near forty-year-old squall tit. 

How Not To Dad: Episode 8 - A Chungus Among Us

Words are funny...

Every now and then my kid will say something that makes me realize how out of touch I am with the youth of today.  Back in my day (he said from his old rocking chair, one eye trained on his immaculately manicured lawn while the other is watching the mailbox for the delivery of his AARP membership card) we had slang words, most of which I don't even remember now.  Some of the milder ones were the surfer-stoner words like "gnarly" or "tubular" or "wicked," ushered into our vocabularies via The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or the Bart Simpson inspired one-liners like "Don't have a cow man," or "Eat my shorts."  If we referred to someone we didn't like, they were a dork or a dweeb, and a dumb person could be called an airhead.  In arguing with friends or enemies, you might suggest that they "take a chill pill" or "chill out."  After Terminator 2 was released in '92, the youth of America became just a touch more fluent in Spanish when the term "Hasta la vista, baby," was introduced.

The nineties rolled on.  By the latter part of that decade, if you were a guy that lived at home witcha  mama and didn't make no money, there was a word for you.  You were a scrub.  Your home became your crib.  Things that were cool, or "gnarly" a decade ago, were now considered "dope."  If you ganked something in the late nineties, that meant you stole it.  The explosion of R&B and rap in those times gave birth to all sorts of random syllables that were thrown together to form words which might mean something totally different than their original intent.   Years before, Michael Jackson talked us into believing the word "bad" actually meant good, and we went along with that for a few decades.  "Phat" meant Pretty Hot And Tempting, not overweight.  If you were "tripping", that didn't mean you were having trouble walking, it meant you weren't acting right or you were out of line.  You were actin' a fool, if you will.  

Being a lily white southern kid who had lived his entire life in a small town in Alabama, I didn't use a lot of those terms but they were definitely in my lexicon.  Everyone knew them, especially if you were a teenager.  My parents, however, had to think kids had invented a new language or something.  There must have been a revolving carousel of frowns and befuddled expressions rolling across their faces whenever kids talked.

It hasn't changed today.  Well, it has changed in one way I guess: I am now the confused parent.  Through the early 2000's I followed along with the slang of the time.  I know what YOLO means, for example.  I know that ratchet doesn't necessarily just refer to a device that loosens bolts; it now means "wretched" as well.  I was a meme connoisseur for a few years there, and was able to keep up with pop culture following the trends created by that medium.  You get past the year 2010 or so, though, and I start to feel a little two-thousand and late.  That world began to mean less and less to me, without me even realizing it.  

So that brings us to the present.  A few weeks ago Logan was playing in our bedroom.  We were preparing to go somewhere, and Abby and I were sitting on the bed while Logan engaged in his usual routine of darting in and out and talking a little too loudly about any number of random subjects that popped into his head.  This day, he introduced us to a new word.

    "I'm a big chungus!"  He shouted as he hopped around on the bed.

    Nikki leaned back from her station in front of the mirror in our bathroom.  "That's the third time he's used that word today."  She said.

    My interest was piqued.  "What's a chungus, Logan?"  I almost giggled at the word as I asked.

    He just shrugged and mumbled some response that sounded like "I don't know" minus all the consonants.

    "Sort of sounds like..." I trailed off, and waited for Nikki to lean back into frame again.  When she did we shared a grin.  Let's just say both of us have found certain urban dictionary words and phrases rather funny, and this one sounded like it might belong to a certain group of definitions that would relate to the sexual experience.  Off to the internet I went, on a search for the almighty chungus.

    "What's wrong with chungus?" Logan asked while I searched on my phone for the meaning.

    "We're just trying to find out what it means."  Nikki said.  "We don't want you to be saying it if it's a bad word."

    "Chungus isn't a bad word, it's just a big fat thing."

    My mind raced as I tried to find the word.  Any number of hideously inappropriate definitions found their way into my thoughts.  If it was as bad as I feared, I'd have to find out where he heard it and tell him why he shouldn't say it, and the worst part was that I was going to have to do it without laughing.  

It is no secret that I find it hilarious when a kid says things they shouldn't say.  In my opinion bad words are funny and that's all there is to it, and it's even funnier when a kid says them.  Having said that I do understand the need to teach my kid which words are and are not acceptable to say. 

Finally I found a definition for chungus.  Google led me, as I had feared, straight to the Urban Dictionary. 

    

Basically, a chungus is a giant, overweight rabbit that destroys things.  Images that popped up during the search portrayed a hefty Bugs Bunny, a lazy smile pushing up his fat cheeks under dazed, stupid eyes.

Part of me felt relief.  An equal part of me wondered how in the skittle-tits a word like that, with a definition like that, even existed.  Sure we had our slang when I was a kid, but not once in my childhood do I ever remember feeling the need to reference and overweight destructive bunny in my day-to-day conversation.  To be honest I'm kind of disappointed that that never came up...

I read the definition out so we could all hear it.  Nikki and I shared confused glances, but all in all thought it was pretty funny.

    "Why didn't y'all want me to say it?"  Logan asked.
 
    "We thought it might be a bad word."  Nikki said.

    "You mean like B-" Logan began, and cut himself off because he knew the word he was about to say was a bad word.

Guess who else knew?

    "Like what?"  I ask him.

    "The B word."  He said.

    "What B word?"  I feigned ignorance.  Come on, say it! I thought.

    He paused for a moment, looked at both of us across the room, and said it.  "Bitch."

    "Logan!" Nikki said.  I could see the smile in her eyes though.  When Logan turned from me I chuckled.

Look, it's funny, okay?  It's funny and it's not hurting anybody, and I will think it's funny for the rest of my life.  We made sure he knows not to say that word, but I suspect I will always ask him to repeat himself if he accidentally lets one slip, just so I can hear him say it again.

Don't judge me.

Moral of the story:  I guess you shouldn't teach your kids bad words, or ask them to repeat them.  And keep up with the lingo.  You never know when your kid might be saying something that sounds cutesy, but is actually slang for some devious sex act.  Don't believe me? Just take a stroll through the pages of the Urban Dictionary.

How not to Dad: Episode 7 - Wordsmithing and Fluids

    It’s inevitable that when you have a child you will come in contact with more poop, pee, puke, drool, spoiled milk, and mashed up gobs of food than you have ever encountered before. There's a whole new world out there of disgusting fluids, solids, and semi-solids just waiting for you to stick your hand in them. Even better, you usually have to pay more attention to the various stuff that comes out of your baby in order to keep a check on their health. You have to look at the poop. Examine it. Things that wouldn’t get a second glance when it comes from your own body suddenly become a scientific study once it exits your baby.

 Observe:

    "Hey, did she poop?" Your wife calls from the living room as you change your daughter's diaper.
    "Uh, yeah." You say.
    "What's it like?"
     You think: What do you mean 'What's it like?' It's like a skunk sprayed a bowl of beef stew that's been sitting in the sun for a week, and then someone dumped it into an absorbent bag. Is that what you want to hear?
    "Uh, well…" You begin.
    "What's the consistency? She’s had diarrhea lately."
    Oh, now we’re talking. This is a question of poop viscosity. You got this. “Um, well today it’s kind of like potato salad made with brown mustard and too much milk.”
     Pause.
     “So, it’s not solid?”
     You have to look again. “No, kinda mushy.”
     “But not totally wet, right?”
     Another peek. “I guess you could say semi-solid.” And from that information we know that the baby is on the mend. Poops are solidifying. Who ever knew that would be such a joyous occasion?

    That wasn't a real conversation between my wife and I, but it isn't too far off (let’s just say I’m gonna keep that potato salad analogy in my back pocket for later use). It's a good idea of how such exchanges can go. You need to know some descriptive adjectives and metaphors, man! Is it the consistency of Elmer's glue or Play-doh? Is it thick like Greek yogurt or is it the runny kind? Does the diaper feel swollen with pee, or just mildly squishy, or is it completely dry? Is your baby teething? Wanna know how to tell? Rivers of drool spilling from her bottom lip at all times, enough to make you fear her dehydration. (How much drool fits in that tiny body anyway?)

 Another fun fact: it doesn't stop once they're older and potty trained. Digestive problems in your kid? Time to examine some turds. Does it burn when they pee? Let's check the color of their urine, maybe they drank too much Coke. Fall on the playground and skinned their hands and knees? Prepare for blood and copious amounts of screaming while you apply band-aids.

 As a horror fan, one of my favorite films is Evil Dead 2. In that movie the main character, Ash, shoots holes in the walls of his cabin while trying to destroy his possessed, severed hand. The hand scuttles through the walls like a rat and whenever it makes noise Ash fires at it. He finally hits paydirt when a thin dribble of blood streams out of the last hole. He laughs in triumph. That is, until the thin dribble begins to build in strength until it is a full-on jet of liquid pummeling his face. From the other holes in the wall more blood erupts, turning his cabin living room into the most gruesome water park ever seen. The blood changes color, becomes black. Every orifice in the cabin is oozing this sloppy, black mess. Ash stumbles around, pinballing back and forth between jets of gross liquid while trying to gain his balance. When I stop to think about it, being a dad is kind of like being Ash in that cabin: standing there with only one hand free, panic distorting your face, not knowing where the next eruption will come from and just having to wait for the inevitable blast of baby fluid to knock you on your ass.


 Moral of the Story: New dads, prepare yourselves. Fluids are coming.

How not to Dad: Episode 6 - The Blueto Ultimatum

    My son has a lot of toys. My son is also very particular about his toys. He was given a large stuffed puppy dog about two years ago by a family friend, and he's kept this stuffed dog in his room - usually on his bed - ever since.
    One weekend we were all sort of lounging around in the master bedroom, hanging out and goofing off and doing a whole lot of nothing. Logan darted in and out of the room wielding various toys like his Minecraft sword or the bolt-action Nerf rifle he'd gotten a couple of birthdays ago, and he laughed and played and was as loud and rowdy as he could be. I think he is constantly testing our limits. He wants to see how loud or hyper he can get before one of us blows a gasket and sends him to his room.
    The truth is I probably handle his hyperactivity better than Nikki. This is not a good thing. I'm not proud of it. See, I like playing with Logan, and I often stoop to the same six-year-old level that he's on. I'll argue with him. I'll egg him on. This tends to get me in the adult version of time-out on a semiregular basis.
    So there we were sitting on the bed playing with Abby, when Logan bursts through the door. "His name is Pluto!" he proclaims, and holds the blue puppy up for everyone to see.
    Now, I wasn't trying to start a situation here. I still maintain that. I was flexing the dad-joke section of my brain when I answered him: "You should call him Blueto instead, since he's blue."
    A harmless statement. Not even a joke, really, just a mildly humorous suggestion that I thought might draw a smile from the kid. I figured he'd have found it way funnier than I did.
    Not so. He thought for a brief moment and then reached his conclusion. "No, it's Pluto."
    "Are you sure?" I pressed, for some reason. "It should be Blueto since he's blue. See?" I motion toward the dog to illustrate my obvious point.
    "No, I want it to be Pluto." Logan said. And that should've been the end of it.
    Spoiler Alert: it wasn't.
    "I'm gonna call him Blueto." I said.
    His eyebrows descended like storm clouds over his eyes. He lowered his head and exhaled. He was a bull about to charge. "His name is Pluto!" He said through gritted teeth.
    I raised my hands in surrender. "Okay okay, Blueto it is."
    He roared and charged. I let him knock me backwards onto the bed, and we wrestled for a few minutes. We argued back and forth, until finally he roared again in frustration and left the room.
    "Logan," I called to him, "Don't be mad that the dog's name is Blueto." Logan returned wielding a foam Minecraft sword. I say foam, but this thing is no pool noodle. The ridges are 8-bit jagged, and the thing is stiff enough to cause some pain if the swing is properly placed.
    "What's his name?" Logan calls again and again as he delivers a barrage of sword strikes on my backside.
    "Blueto!" I call from beneath the comforter (an object which is not holding up to its definition, I might add). "His name is Blueto!"
    Logan growls and pummels me with the sword. I take a few good strikes to the buttocks before he tires. He walks back to the bedroom door and stands there glaring at me.
    "Okay, y'all are getting a little too rough. We're going to the living room," my wife says and picks our daughter up. They exit the battle zone.
    By this point I have committed. I can't physically bring myself to say "Pluto." To me, every time I answer with "Blueto" it seems funnier and funnier. And so, I press on.
    "Okay okay, Logan. You want me to say it?" I ask.
    "Yes." He answers. I can see a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
    "Logan, he's not gonna say it," Nikki calls from the living room.
    "Say it." Logan demands anyway.
    I start to smile and I see the faintest of grins dance on the corner of his mouth before he snaps it tight again. "Say his name is Pluto."
    “I’m telling you Logan, he’s not gonna say it.” Nikki calls.
    "The dog's name," I say slowly, drawing out the suspense, "is…" Silence. Logan's eyes burn holes through me. "Blueto."
    "Aaaaahhh!" Logan shouts and throws his hands up. He walks back to his room fuming. I chuckle to myself for a moment. Have I taken it too far? Probably. It's off the rails now, though. The train of sensibility has not only left the station, it has careened down the tracks at suicide speeds, its brake lever broken, its massive weight charging it forward at an unstoppable pace. I simply can not say Pluto. It would violate some inner code in me that I shouldn't even have. I felt like a kid again pestering my sister and it being harder to stop the more I knew it was annoying her. In all honesty I probably deserved a good kick in the nuts. Then and now.
    So I was sitting there at the edge of the bed reminiscing about how much of an asshole I am when Logan walked back into the room, turned, and closed the door behind him, effectively sealing us off from the rest of the house. He turned back to me and that's when I noticed the Nerf gun. He slipped a foam bullet into the chamber, shoved the bolt-action lever forward, snapped it back and folded it down in a few swift motions. I half smiled as I watched him do this. He smiled too. Then he lifted the gun and a barrel of yellow plastic was staring at me from only two feet away. Logan's eyes locked on me in a dead stare. His smile fell. So did my own.
    I was a sitting duck.
    Logan’s eyebrows raised. "What's his name?" He asked, his finger twitching on the trigger...
    I'm a lot of things, but I ain't no coward. Only the slightest nervous gulp escaped my lips as I gave my answer.

The freakin’ dog’s name is Blueto.

 Moral Of The Story: Maybe don't be an asshole to your kids, or you just may take a bullet to the chest, like I did.

How Not To Dad: Episode 5 - What Formula?

Its morning time, and baby is crying.  Got up. Found bottle. Washed bottle. Got bottle ready. Filled with warm water.  Shook the bottle for a good minute. 
Never put formula in bottle.

How Not To Dad: Episode 4 - Koumpounophobia

    To begin this fourth episode, what I'd like to do is ship a flux capacitor laden Delorean to the corner of Gitschiner street and Linden street in Berlin, Germany, set the displays to March 5, 1885, back that sumbitch up about a quarter of a meile (that's mile to us English speaking folk), aim it at the German Patent Office, and gun it.  If there is any true sense of fate or destiny in this crazy universe, and a kneifen (pinch) or two of luck, I'd meet the sidewalk to that building at the exact moment that a gentleman named Heribert Bauer is strolling his happy arsch into the patent office, probably carrying an envelope with some documents and a little prototype metal object a bit smaller than a dime stuffed into it.  Hopefully the time machine would materialize just close enough to Mr. Bauer so that the DMC logo on the grill would rustle his pant leg as it screamed to a stop an inch from his knees.
    In the nice version this would happen, and Bauer would fling the envelope into the air and scamper away unharmed.  I'd pick the envelope up, throw it in a trashcan somewhere, then start trying to figure out how I'd get back home since you can't get plutonium in Berlin in 1885.  It's not available at every corner store yet.
    In the not so nice version, the Delorean doesn't stop inches from the knees, if you know what I mean.  Either way, the envelope and its contents must be destroyed, for the happiness of dads everywhere.
    What's in the envelope, you ask?  What little metal object can cause such rage as to inspire me to want to bend space-time itself, risking all of existence in order to stop this object from being invented altogether?
    The snap button.  The snap button is what's in the envelope.  What Mr. Bauer (or the man who perfected the design almost twenty years later, or the thousands of textile workers and designers who slap these little metal bastards all over baby clothes) didn't take into account was that you can't really snap thirty-eight buttons together from ankles to nipples of a wriggling baby who's pissed off because she has to wear clothes.
    The common baby has two legs.  For some reason, someone once decided it would be a good idea to put a row of buttons up both legs that met in the middle, so you can unsnap all of these buttons quickly for easy access to the diaper.  It works, too!  Getting the onesie undone is pretty easy when dealing with buttons.
    Getting the onesie back on, though, is like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle while riding a unicycle during an earthquake.  My daughter is a calm baby, but even calm babies have pretty short fuses when you're trying to snap the "male" side of the button to the "female" side only to find after three or four buttons that the "male" side is a cheating bastard and is sticking his appendage in the wrong partner.  So you unsnap, re-snap, do the same with the other leg, and when you get to the joint where the legs meet the hips you find two "female" side buttons staring at each other.  Now you've got to rework the buttons and try to figure out how they became lesbians somewhere along the way.
    Now try doing all that while your pissed off baby is screaming and kicking at your face.

Moral of the Story:  If your wife takes you shopping for baby clothes and gets all excited about an outfit for your daughter and asks your opinion, you only need to be looking for one thing: how many buttons does it have?  If the answer to that is more than three, protest.  Argue with your wife if you have to.  Sleep on the couch that night.  Trust me, the argument will be easier to deal with.

How Not To Dad: Episode 3 - Night Terrors

    How Not To Dad: Episode 3 - Night Terrors

   I spent a ton of time in haunted houses in my twenties and early thirties.  It was what my friends and I did.  Around Halloween time, several local attractions would pop up in our area and we'd travel sometimes out of state to visit the most notorious of them.  We even visited real haunted locations, like Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville.  I think we all loved that constant buzz of adrenaline, that anticipation of what's going to happen next.
    Is a chainsaw-wielding clown going to pop out of the corner and chase me through the trail?
    Is that mannequin really a mannequin?
    What's tickling my leg?
    Do you hear that sound?
    Who's screaming?
    When things get quiet is when the real terror begins.  That's when someone - or some thing - is gearing up to try and scare at least a moderate-sized squirt of piss out of you.  That's when you need to be on your toes, you know?
    Fast-forward to today.  On some nights, I live in a haunted house.  The haunts in my home are unhappy children sent to bed thirsty, or babies mad that they can't sleep in bed with their mommy.
    One night last week my wife and I put our son to bed, and then carried our daughter to her little playpen bed in our room.  After Abby fell asleep, my wife and I laid down and watched a couple of episodes of The Office until we fell asleep. 
    The first phantom appeared before midnight.  A little boy, about five years old.  It touched my shoulder and I rolled over to face it while half asleep and coming out of a dream. 
    "Can I have a cup of water?" The ghost whispered. 
    I motioned towards a bottle of water on my night stand.  "Take it," I murmured.  The thought of this phantom returning to his room and peeing the bed didn't occur to me.  I just wanted my sleep back.  The ghost soon vanished.
    Ten minutes later the second ghost wailed into the night from the foot of my bed.  I jerked out of sleep, my eyes open wide.  The sound dissipated, and I started to think I had imagined it when a rustling came from the same place.  

    Then another moan.

    I laid perfectly still.  I prayed this little ghost wouldn't hear me and wake up screaming.

    After several minutes of lying there stiff as a corpse I finally began to doze again.  The movement at the foot of the bed ceased.  I sank into sleep, feeling its warm arms envelope me as I drifted further and further from consciousness.

    "Mommy!" Something called from the other room.
    My eyelids twitched open.  What time is it?

    "Mommy!"
    My stomach shriveled.  Goosebumps sprouted on my arms.  Some part of me hearkened back to those childhood fears from watching too many horror movies.  There's just something really unsettling about hearing voices shouting from somewhere in a dark house in the middle of the night.
    Even if it is your son.
    "MOMMY!"

    I look at my wife, who is shifting in our bed, half asleep.  

    I couldn't tell if I was fully awake or dreaming the sound.  The eerie sensation lingered.  My fear, though, was not of a supernatural entity waiting to harvest my soul the minute I stepped off the bed to go investigate.  My fear was a sick child.  Not only do you not want your kid to be in pain, you also don't want to be scrubbing hurl out of their bedroom carpet at 2:00 a.m. on a weeknight.
    "MOMMY!" 
    My wife's eyes are half open.
    "What is it Logan?"  She calls out.
    We've got to be careful.  The other little ghost has fallen asleep no more than six feet away.  We don't need a double haunting.
    "Come in here, Logan."  I call, hoping to somehow trick the properties of sound into allowing a shout that is also a whisper.  The delicate balance holds.  My daughter remains asleep.
    A door opens somewhere.
    Footsteps thump across the hall.
    Our bedroom door swings open, spilling light from the hallway across our bed.  A figure stands there.  "My tooth hurts."  He says.
    Nikki and I look at each other, then back at Logan.
    "Um, which one hurts?  The wiggly one?"  Nikki asks.
    "Uh-huh," he whines.  I can tell by his posture that he's half asleep.  His shoulders are slumped, and his head is hanging at an angle like he's trying to hold it up but doesn't have enough energy.  I think it hits both Nikki and I at the same moment that he's sleepwalking.  He'd gone to the dentist that day and had gotten a good report.  His tooth shouldn't be hurting.  (I never verified if he was dreaming about the dentist, but I did ask him the next day if his tooth still hurt.  "Nope." he said.)
    "Go back to bed and get to sleep, baby." Nikki tells him.  "It'll feel better in the morning."
    Logan shuffles off.  We hear his door close.
    While Nikki fell back asleep, I laid on my back staring at the ceiling.  The barrage of waking jolts kept me on edge.  I couldn't help but lay there anticipating the next jump scare.  I was like a kid trying to wait out a storm, knowing that next thunderclap is coming but not knowing when.
    An hour later I finally made it to sleepytown.  The next time I awoke it was to the wail of an alarm clock.  I roll out of bed, the events of last night now a fading memory.  My body sure as hell remembers, though.  I've become a zombie for the day, shambling through the hallways and cubicles at my workplace in voracious search not for brains but for coffee.  That sweet, delicious potion that has the ability to rouse the dead and hold the ghosts of last night at bay.
    At least until tonight.


Moral of the Story: Sleep all you can.  Sleep is good.  Sleep is life.  Sleep.  Sleep.  Sleepysleepsleep.... sleep.  zzzz...  zzzzzzzz....