It’s the simple things

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I want to write about one of life's simplest pleasure. Man, I woke up this morning, and my bedroom was chilly. My girlfriend was all crêped up in her down blanket on the other side of my giant bed, and the floor fan was blowing on me, and the window fan was sucking in the relatively smoke-free air from my backyard where the sprinkler was cooling the earth and the air above it. I had slept so hard, I felt almost indescribably good.

What is it about sleep? I'm almost never tired. In fact, I'm never tired except in between semesters when I satisfy my love of excess red wine. Truly and maybe obviously, drinking depressants is pretty much the only thing that can slow my engine down. I'm no Leonardo Da Vinci—who reportedly used polyphasic sleep, which is a type of sleep pattern that involves sleeping not more than 5 hours a day in 20-minute intervals—or a Leonardo Di Caprio either, but there's just something about an energetic life that feels as though it bestows immeasurable energy.

But still, that feeling of the nested warmth, and the coiling of an internal stretch that precedes throwing the sheet and blanket off and heading for the shower, I just don't know that there's a more simple pleasure. Well, a baby's toothless grin comes pretty close, but then you have to clean up the poop.

On the other hand, there are times when my circadian clock is running like a broken digital, and I'll lay awake all night watching Netflix after Netflix. I can almost always attribute that to the energized life as well. It's like one of those nickle-cadmium batteries that are always a little too full so they can't be fully charged. That's caused by batteries never being fully discharged. To push the analogy, if you never get exhausted, by exercise or wakefulness or whatever, you develop this “memory effect.”

But I'll bet you're like me, and you'd rather dwell on a good sleep than lay in bed wondering why you can't.