4/15/2008

When I am King: Rest in Pieces

When I am King...

We'll all sleep more and hurt ourselves less.

I socked myself in the nose last night, tucking my kid into bed. One little slip when pulling the blanket up and BONK! This kind of thing is typical for me: stubs, trips, paper cuts, shaving nicks, chainsaw mishaps, and on and on.

Meanwhile, every night I pass out in my bed and spend a blissfully injury-free, oh, two hours before I have to get up and go hurt myself in the wide awake world again. Somehow, I manage to get through sleeping every night unscathed (not counting the emotional damage of my recurring nightmare of zombies chasing me with copies of my 5th grade book report on Where the Red Fern Grows).

In thinking about it between incidents of biting my cheek and stabbing myself in the eye with a fork, I realized that we're all much safer sleeping. Sleep keep the accident-prone from running themselves through with the nearest scissors or wooden spoon. Sleep would also keep the evil despots of the world happily dreaming of stealing other kids' lunch money instead of plotting worldwide destruction.

When I am King, everyone will be encouraged to sleep more. Of course, this is easier said than done, and we're still prone to injury walking around in a dark house as we make our way to the bottle of scotch that keeps us company on sleepless nights. That's why the air, water, and critical food products like donuts will be laced with anti-histamines. Also, the clocks will be changed to zip through the day much faster and creep through the night more slowly, ensuring long hours of sleep and shorter days of pain and bandages.

I think I can safely claim that sleep has prevented more owies in the world than anything else since people stopped wearing glass slippers. In fact, maybe death is just nature's way of getting us to stop hurting ourselves (we considered death to be too extreme a solution, however, so we're going with this sleep plan instead).

If you think about it, I think you'll agree. Sleep on it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chet:

I've been recording these "When I am King" posts so I know what will happen when you are king.

WHEN will you be king, exactly?

So I can tell when these things will occur?


Jim Mattson
Annandale HS

Anonymous said...

Chet:

I've been recording these "When I am King" posts so I know what will happen when you are king.

WHEN will you be king, exactly?

So I can tell when these things will occur?


Jim Mattson
Annandale HS