You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Bedroom Light.
The alarm blares at 6:30.
It sounds like a submarine about to launch a nuke from under my pillowcase.
I am startled, disoriented, as I try to open my bleary eyes that crave more dreamlike rest.
It’s cold and dark in my bedroom. The heater doesn’t work well and I swear I can see my breath float into the dark mist before me.
I’ve got the comforter pulled up to my chin. I am in a cocoon of self-contained heat. It is warm and nurturing like a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.
The last thing I want to do is extricate myself from this bedtime womb. I am not ready to be birthed, no not yet.
I try and recall the last moments of a dream that had me falling off a building and jerking my leg in a deep sleep REM.
Eventually I throw my legs over the side of the bed and feel the cold of the morning attack my exposed skin like an icy parasite. It is gnawing on my toes like frost bite.
I walk down the dark corridor listening to my feet creek on the old floor boards under the spongy carpet.
I get to the landing and then I see the glow.
It is mutating under the door like a life form, like a Frankenstein monster being created in a sinister laboratory.
I stop and shake my head. I stare at the orange glow emanating from the tiny space between the carpet and the bedroom door.
The light is bright enough to make me squint. It is early an my eyes are dilated. I need a welder’s face shield to stare at the light it seems so intense.
“You left your light on again,” I shout, putting my hand in front of my eyes to shield myself from the blanket of light.
I wait for a response.
It is silent, as always.
I continue down the stairs muttering to myself.
As I hold onto the bannister in the dark, guessing where to put each foot on the stairs, I wonder to myself; Why does he fall asleep every night with the light on.
I get to the coffee pot and begin emptying the dried grounds I made 24 hours ago.
I fill the pot half way and pour it into the rear tank.
Why does the flow of water always drip down the side of the carafe and puddle on the counter?
I mop up the spilled water with a paper towel and push the power button.
As I hear the coffee pot gurgle to life, I think to myself; Every morning, the ritual is the same.
I walk down the hallway past my son’s door and I see the light blaring from within, like a blast furnace of wasted energy.
It makes me think something spectacular, something newsworthy is happening behind the door, but I know better.
My son is snoring, loudly.
Once again, he has gone to bed, and once again he has fallen asleep with the light on.
How can he sleep with a light bulb directly over his head.
It would be like standing on a railroad track and watching that light rapidly consume you?
How could you sleep?
It would be like a UFO hovering over your house with an eerie tractor beam, then reaching through a bright light into your room, only to probe you in your sleep.
How could you sleep through that?
I need pitch black to sleep.
If there is so much as a full moon creeping into the room at night, I am aware of it.
“Hey you, Firefly, zip it! I need pure darkness.”
Is he really my son? Did he come from the fruit of my loins?
I love dark and he loves light?
We are as different in our sleep patterns as a Sonny and Cher sound check.
I couldn’t nap as a child.
Too much sunlight to nap.
I am not a cat.
I am not a Mexican on siesta.
I need a still, calm, black void to close my eyes and let my brain slowly meander into oblivion.
Sleeping with the light on?
I’d rather be water boarded by CIA operatives reeking of tequila and icy hot.
“How do you sleep with the light on?” I ask him when he finally emerges from his Frankenstein lair.
“I don’t know,” he says mumbling like a goat eating tin cans in a junk yard.
“I just fall asleep,” he adds.
But the damn light is on!
Every damn night, the light is on.
I think about the power meter running like a run-a-way taxi cab driven by a Somali chewing Kaat.
What a waste of energy, I think to myself.
I could buy a filet with all the power I’m sucking in off the grid to rock my boy to sleep.
The only people with lights on at night are operating grow houses for marijuana.
I wonder if the DEA is secretly checking high energy usage in the neighborhood.
Can I one day expect my door to blow open and masked lawmen to blow inside with guns?
“Whose burning the midnight oil around here?” They will scream.
I can only imagine my sleepy-eyed son walking out of his bedroom bathed in wasted energy scratching his head saying “Whose making all the racquet down there?”
“Take him down,” the DEA agents will shout. “That’s the grow room operator.”
“Tape a note to the light switch,” I yelled at him one day.
“Huh?”
“A note to yourself that says TURN OFF THE LIGHT!”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says just wanting me to shut up.
The next morning, at 6:30 am.
I walk down the darkened hallway and I see the golden glow of wasted kilowatt-hours bleeding out the window, and seeping under the door.
Like a baked potato in a run-a-way microwave oven, the boy is being cooked in his sleep, 60 watts at a time, for 8 hours.
He is a human rotisserie chicken slowly incubating to a golden brown.
“You better put some suntan lotion on,” I facetiously warn.
“Huh?” he says with the enthusiasm of dishwashing detergent.
“Oh, yeah right.”
And so it goes.
The single light in the night that burns, that irradiates, that glows forever into a void of who cares?
Spin power meter – spin.
Blow your 60 watts of wasted energy across the vast plasma field of my son’s life.
He doesn’t care.
He must have heavy eye lids like blast shields from a nuclear bunker.
If he can sleep with the light on, then I guess sleep with the light on.
Keeps the boogie man away, and lets burglars know that someone inside could be playing solitaire with a 9mm on the night stand.
So what should I get the boy for Christmas?
I think a 4 pack of light bulbs and a sleep mask.
Come to think of it.
Maybe if he’s probed by a UFO, he’ll learn his lesson.
Life’s Crazy™