Ambien And Beer

The other night, I'm home alone, my wife has been in the hospital for a few days, I haven't slept at all, and I'm beginning to unravel. Me unraveling is a scary prospect; I've never been that raveled to begin with. Determined to get a decent night's sleep, I decide to take one of M's Ambien...and wash it down with a bomber of Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary (9.2% alcohol by volume). I've often wondered why
my wife falls asleep like this:


And that's on Ambien alone. (I keep a stash of these photos as blackmail material.)

I take the Ambien, I hang out on the couch drinking a beer, unfortunately I write a blog post:


People on Twitter probably thought I was joking, but I wasn't. That's the nice thing about being full of shit nearly 100% of the time — you can always claim you were kidding or making crazy crap up.

The Job Interview

Job interviewer dude: So what's this I saw on Twitter about taking Ambien and drinking beer, do you make a habit of it?

Me: Well, ya see...I'm actually a character on Twitter...and my blog...and sometimes in person.

Job interviewer dude: Wow, that sounds healthy, you are totally hired!

Me: Really?

Job interviewer dude: No you dumbass. I was just playing a character, who is an idiot, who would actually hire a freakshow like you.

Me: I do that too! We have so much in common. You wanna go out for a beer?

Job interviewer dude: Yes, absolutely, we should do that.

Me: Really?

Job interviewer dude: No. Not really. Dumbass.

So I write the blog post, do some prep for the next morning (fill the teakettle for the french press etc.) then I go to bed. I decide that I'm not really all that sleepy, so I start watching a relaxing movie on my laptop called "Paranormal Activity" that involves a lot of things going bump in the night and phantom shadows being cast on the wall.

A little while later I start hearing noises outside the bedroom, like real "there is someone in my house" noises outside the bedroom. I get up, look around for a potential weapon to assault the intruder with (I grabbed a small, lightweight trash can) and open the door. "Who's there? HELLO!" (If my neighbors were up, they definitely heard this.) The noise is coming from the kitchen, so I peak my head in to see that the burner under the teakettle is on full blast and the element is red hot. I shut it off and begin to search for something more substantial to defend myself with. My pull up bar looks substantial, so I pull the cotter pins out and proceed to scour my house for burglars, holding the two pipes from the pull up bar like an eight-year-old playing ninja assassin.

After a thorough search of the entire house, including the basement, I determine that the house is "clean," I lock the basement and bedroom doors (not normal) and go back to bed.

I was so out of it, it didn't occur to me until the next morning, that I had turned the burner on absentmindedly when I filled the teakettle. What's more astonishing than that is that I went to bed thinking someone had just come inside my house and turned the burner on. Apparently, in my Ambien and beer haze, I was okay with that.


M's revenge: me falling asleep while reading Bike Snob NYC's book. The book really isn't that boring. I would have fallen asleep during a bucking bronco ride in the state I was in.

Looking for a bike story? I wrote a little one over on the 29er Crew blog.