How I envy the people who can fall asleep fast enough to make you think they got kicked in the teeth by a horse. How I wish that horse could give me the same blunt force trauma so I could get any kind of sleep. But no, instead my horse gives me a Five-Hour Energy and a siren instead.

Let me walk you through an average night.

After spending anywhere between thirty minutes to an hour trying to contort my non-flexible body into a pretzel shape that for some reason my brain thinks is comfortable, I drift off to sleep.

For about twenty minutes.

Whether it be my brother in the room next to me snoring louder than the train that comes by, or the weather outside looking and sounding like God hocked a loogie, or just my own bad luck; I wake up again, and I know it’s an insomnia night. 

Realizing that my chances of getting any good sleep are close to the chances that the Democrats and Republicans will sit down and have a serious talk about how they can put their differences aside for the betterment of the country, I stumble down the stairs into the kitchen and open the fridge.

Just like every night, I forget that fridge lights exist and don’t mentally prepare myself for being blinded, so I quickly just grab the first thing there, then continue on to try to create a scale model of Stonehenge out of cheese sticks. 

After deciding to stick to fruit snack cathedrals, I walk back up to my room, hoping that my architectural food expedition was enough to bore and exhaust me enough to fall asleep. Unfortunately, when I belly flop onto my bed, I can’t get comfortable. Now why would that be? Must be because my brain, in my insomniac state, could not stop imagining that my own pillow was my 17 consecutive awful poker hands.

So after laying down on a not so full house, I lay in my bed, not falling asleep, and I start to think. 

This is where I really start to sound crazy.

I start thinking about how the villagers in my Animal Crossing town have probably advanced to a point to create the IRS and are waiting for me to come back after months just to present me with a warrant for my arrest for evading taxes. Then I look around and see the old beyblades sitting on my dresser and spiral into an existential crisis: the world is spinning just like my beyblades, but who wins the brawl when the world stops spinning?

At this point it’s 4 a.m. and I’ve given up hope. I get up, do some jumping Jacks and some leaping Lindas, and move my pillow to the opposite side of the bed to make me look even more of a maniac.

Eventually pure exhaustion takes over and I pass out harder than a guy who thought laughing gas would make him funnier.

Then before it even starts, it ends.

BEEEP.

I’ve got about 45 minutes of sleep under my belt, and the bags under my eyes are big enough for that horse to do laps to train for the Kentucky Derby.