THE MAGIC OF NEVER HAVING ENOUGH SLEEP (aka my adventures with narcolepsy)

My narcolepsy scares the crap out of me. But you should SEE how it scares everyone else around me!




Narcolepsy is one of those medical conditions that make no damn sense. You can fall asleep anytime, and often do, no matter where you're at, but yet you're always tired. And it's utterly amazing both to the victim and anyone around them just how easy it is to just conk out at any second's notice.



Anyone can fall asleep in church. I”VE fallen asleep while standing in the middle of a crowded museum. I've added my own special sound effects of snoring to countless movies, often provoking more laughter out of the audience around me than the alleged comedies we're watching. On occasion, i've been told I was scaring children too – which is not what you want to happen during a showing of “Toy Story.” However, I drew some admiring comments for the stereo magic I added to a showing of “Where the Wild Things Are.”



Let's keep going, shall we? I've fallen asleep at numerous jobs, which hasn't helped my employment history. I'm probably the only person in the history of Hollywood to sleep my way OUT of a job. Then of course I fell asleep at the unemployment office too, and on the bus ride over there. I fall asleep on all buses and trains to anywhere, which both protects me from seeing some of the scary people onboard but more distressingly makes me unaware of countless bad scenarios I really should be conscious for.



Tied in with the heavylidded wonderworld of narcolepsy is the even more bizarre practice of sleepwalking. I don't know what causes sleepwalking for most people, but for me it's the fact that I don't sleep right for nights on end when I WANT to crash, and then fighting to stay awake when I truly DO need to stay up. Eventually I think my brain reaches a sort of neurological traffic jam caused by the mixed signals finally jamming up so tight I decide to sleep and run errands both at the same time. Eventually it gets so bad some nights that I wind up freezing in place while standing and by the grace of God manage to reawaken while still upright, which makes me wonder how I wound up with a magazine in one hand and a glass of OJ in the other while standing two inches in front of my TV screen.



That's one upside of narcolepsy: it keeps life unpredictable and exciting! Each time I fall asleep unexpectedly or wake up suddenly in a new location thanks to the magic of conking out on the bus, it's like i've drugged, kidnapped and abandoned myself! One night last week, I was so tired I kept oversleeping and missing my train station on three different runs of the Gold Line! Woke up two stops too far one way, got off to catch the train coming back to my stop, and then woke up THREE stops too far on that one before finally managing to climb off at the right stop.



So what's the most embarrassing place I've fallen asleep, you ask? It has to be anytime I fall asleep while on the toilet. It's bad enough when my pissed-off roommates have had to pound on the door for hours to gain entry for their own desperate usage needs, but it's a particularly ghastly situation when a security guard has to pound the hell out of a stall door and assumes that i've nodded off after shooting too much heroin. I get to live the life of William S. Burroughs without the expense of actually buying the drugs.



So you might guess I don't drive. You're right – fell asleep at the wheel six years ago and crashed! Thats forced me to learn the bus and train system in LA, which is also scary but that's a WHOLE other essay. Thankfully my job as an entertainment reporter enables me to land tickets to a lot of cool events so my friends don't mind driving me around, but my job as an entertainment reporter means I've also fallen asleep while listening to some of the world's most glamorous and allegedly interesting people. Imagine the shock that coursed through OSCAR-winning actress Hilary Swank's veins when she was prattling on last week about her new movie “Amelia” - a real snoozer by the way, no pun intended – and I nearly fell forward out of my chair by an unexpected snooze attack. In front of a roomful of my journalistic brethren who all gasped in horror, she gamely offered the fact that she knew the Heimlich maneuver in case I was dying on her. If she had offered CPR, I might have faked my way through a worse situation, but I pulled it together and said I'd simply taken the wrong allergy meds.



On Saturday night, I went to see filmmaker Kevin Smith offer an audience Q&A and got a little too comfortable, sprawling my feet up on an empty seat or two in front of me until he saw me and, over the microphone and in front of a thousand people, screamed “Hey you! Sleepy guy! Wake the fuck up!” THAT scared me. I sprung awake and wound up nearly hitting the floor as my legs and arms splayed out in every direction.



You might wonder if i'm ever gonna do something about it. My mom's figured a way to scare me into it now. I just inherited some money from my beloved grandma, and she just told me I need to visit a neurologist and figure out just what the hell is going on before she'll let me see a dime of it. So next week I'm getting looked at and possibly even cured – which means i'll have to look at this scary world head-on for the first time in a long long while.