I'm at work and so tired right now it's not even funny. I will stare at my computer monitor and suddenly there's two of them and they get all blurry. Then they start floating up and down slightly and towards each other.
I'm not sure how many times this has happened this morning, but I can tell you this, my friend: it has happened too much. And every time it does, once I snap out of it I wonder how long I've been sitting there staring like that. Seconds? Minutes? I always look at the clock to try and get a rough estimate, but then realize you have to know what time you started dozing off in order to do the math and figure out how long you've actually been out.
I went on a lot of road trips in the Pinto with my Grampa Freeman when I was a wee lad. When he wasn't busy playing his harmonica, singing along with Slim Whitman on the AM radio or explaining the ways of the world to me, he'd put this little device in his ear. It looked sort of like a hearing aid and I always wondered what it was - so one day I finally asked him.
"What's that white thing you put on your ear?" I said while studying his profile and looking at his ear with that big white thing on it poking above his blue baseball cap.
"It's an alarm. If I start falling asleep and my head goes like this," he said while bobbing his head down as I heard a faint buzzzzzz go off, "it buzzes and wakes me up so I don't drive off the road."
"Huh," I said and put my headphones back on. I remember we were on our way back from the cabin and Herbie Hancock's Earth Beat was cranking through my Walkman. I had the "bass" switch set to on and it was making my headphones break up a little. I was hungry for some Doritos and my clothes smelled of Grampa Cabin: a cross between fireplace, pork, salt, and mothballs.
This ear thing made me feel a little uneasy. My little 11 year old life was depending on a teeny little device that emitted a faint buzz if Gramps nodded off. And who knows where the Hell he got that from – most likely Sears Surplus or some other outlet store. So who knows how well it worked if at all. "What if his head doesn't bob when he dozes off?" I wondered. "Gramps always asks me to speak up and is a little hard of hearing... what if he doesn't hear the buzzer?"
For the rest of that trip, every time the car swerved ever so slightly from the wind I crapped my pants in terror thinking he was dozing off and the alarm wasn't working.
Thankfully I never did hear that buzz other than the one time he demonstrated it for me, nor did we ever crash. I'm particularly thankful I never saw him put that thing on his ear before taking me out for rides to St. Paul on his motorcycle. If he ever did that, he may as well just loosen all of the bolts holding the seat on as well to convince me that I was going to die.
I always think of that ear alarm when I'm tired and stoopid like this. That is one thing I looked for in the Pinto when I first drove it to see if he left it in there.. that and the harmonica.
Technology has evolved some since then and I think it's time they invent a bigger and better version of that anti-sleep contraption. Put it in a pair of glasses. The lenses would detect when your eyelids start to close and you go cock-eyed, and then shoot a brief zap of electricity into your eyeballs to snap your muthafuckin' ass out of the tired zone once and for all. I reckon this could probably be done with a 9 volt battery, some wires, and a few other parts from Radio Shack.
Believe you me, if I were sitting here right now knowing that I was at risk of having my lovely blue eyes stung with an electric current if they became all lazy and googly on me, hells if I would be dozing off at the monitor like this anytime soon.
