A Burning Question

Why, oh why, am I incapable of falling asleep before 3am whenever I sleep at my own house? Because when I sleep at my boo's, I instantly pass out into the velvet sea of at least 8 hours of slumber. Also, his bedroom is dark and womblike and he has very comfy pillows and down-filled comforters of joy. My bedroom is dark-ish, and it's red, and I have lovely bedding that shimmers in the right light. But when I try to sleep here, I find myself awake until odd hours of the night. Possibly because my bed is next to a window, and that window overlooks an alley, and that alley is filled with Mexican restaurant workers who bang loud metal objects together and shout. I should add: they are workers at a Mexican restaurant, which does not necessarily mean that they are of Mexican descent. No racist implications here, I assure you. However, no matter their ethnic background, these surely-underpaid restaurant employees are very loud. And then there are the garbage trucks. Oh, the never-ending stream of garbage trucks. And the cars with their pimped out stereo systems blasting music so loud that I can only hear the bassline. And sometimes the kitties think it's fun to jump on my furniture and knock things over. I try to keep breakable objects away in cabinets, but they love nothing more than to knock my hair products off the shelf, one by one. And I have a very great number of hair products because I have problem hair. And they simply love to bat things with their little kitty paws. Just last week, one kitty knocked over my roomie's lamp. I heard the crash and assumed I was hallucinating (again), but just like that noxious smell was really real, the crashnoise was really real and the final score is Kitties: 1, Touch lamp: 0.

So, because I can't sleep, and I don't want to start doing any real writing because that will keep me up all night, and if I start reading, I'll be up til dawn, I am scouring youtube for things I recall with fond nostalgia. Which is why I'm looking for this old commercial for Mr. Bubble, wherein the jingle singers sang, "You can be a bubblehead - with Mr. Bubble!" Because when I was a kid, at the town pool, for one brief glorious summer, whenever someone jumped off the diving board, the person about to jump would cry out: "You can be a bubblehead!" And the rest of the kids waiting on line for the diving board would reply "With Mr. Bubble!" I should add that I often found myself waiting in this very same line, and then my turn would come and I would climb up and walk out to the end of the diving board, which was always somewhat slippery and frightening, and I'd get to the end of the diving board, and I'd look down and find myself paralyzed with fright, and I'd walk back to the safety of the cement and de-mount the diving board.

A few years later, I managed to jump of the diving board. But I would still approach the end with trepidation and then I would pause and attempt to jack-knife my body into the diving position, and then I would try and try and try to work up the courage to enter the pool head-first, and I would freak out, and just jump in and pretend that nothing weird had happened.

To this day, I have still never dived (dove?) into a pool, or a lake, or an anything. Although once I did go balls to the wall and I jumped off a cliff into a quarry, but that required about 15 minutes of coaxing from my friends, and a dependency on the "balls to the wall" mantra of awe.