You’d think not really going anywhere for the past four months would have given me nothing but time to chronicle life in this novel coronavirus pandemic. But time is a funny thing. When you have too much of it, it stops. (Sounds like something Yogi Berra might say. But he’s been tagged out for a long time, so … no.)

Now, throw working from home on top of that, and any kind of structure you used to have is gone. Some days I’m up and answering emails at 4:30 AM. I wrote to my brother yesterday at 2:25 in the morning! And then after supper — supper! Who calls it that? It’s DINNER! After DINNER, when there’s not much to do but play another game of Yahtzee, or watch ‘Jumanji 2’ (which is actually ‘Jumanji 3’) for the 14th time this month, I’ll just go into the home office and start doing more work. Work that should have been done in the daytime.

In short, my circadian rhythm has lost the beat. And because of that, a not-so-funny thing has happened.

I don’t sleep anymore.

Here’s where my wife, Carrie, would jump in and say, ‘What are you talking about? All you DO is sleep!!. So let me explain.

It’s not that I don’t sleep. What I don’t do is is say goodnight, and go to sleep until 7 the next morning. Instead, I tend to fall asleep watching TV, from like 10 to 1 AM, then go to bed and play that absolutely bewitching game of connecting the like-colored dots in various hexes for a couple of hours. (Bewitching? Hexes? I’ll bet he thinks he’s clever!) If I’m lucky, I’ll fall asleep until about 4:30. I’ll toss around til about 6 AM, fall asleep for another hour, and watch the morning news and weather til about 8:30, at which time I might fall back to sleep for another hour.

So, where’s the rhythm in that, you ask? Well, my sleep pattern is like ‘Seinfeld’ Elaine’s dancing. All arms and legs akimbo! (50-point bonus word score!)

I’ve tried everything short of prescription drugs (see what I did there?) to get a good night’s sleep, all to no avail.

But you know me.. always looking at the bright side. It IS fun when people text me at odd hours to ‘leave me a message’ and I respond right away. I’ll usually get back an awkward ‘LOL!.. What are YOU doing up’ — awkward, because .. what are THEY doing up?

And there is a weird peace to being the only one awake in the middle of the night. Come to think of it, our dog Bailey doesn’t sleep at all either — or he sleeps with his eyes open, which is just super-creepy. And, I fear Carrie’s rhythm is also losing its beat. At 3 AM, I’ll be watching a video of a pig giving a horse a ‘happy ending’ (Eww.. did he really just write that? What kind of YouTube channels is HE watching? PERV!!!) and suddenly I’ll hear Carrie: ‘Can’t you turn the sound OFF?’ Poor dear, she can’t sleep either!

Some folks are scared of being up and alone in the middle of the night. I embrace it. It’s the only real quiet time I have all day, and it actually calms me, soothes me. Hmmm.. sounds like a great time to sleep!! If only ….