Wake-up Call

I need more sleep than the average bear. I'm also a light sleeper and I have to pee a lot. Basically, I'm pretty high maintenance. Usually, this isn't a big deal. I go to bed early and if I have to get up and go to the bathroom, I can fall back to sleep within a few minutes.

However, the past few weeks haven't worked out for me sleep-wise, because every day at about 4am, a thunderous roar has been waking me up. It wasn't an airplane or a chopper or anything impressive like that. No sir. I got up one morning to see what was making the racket, and it was a crappy-ass little compact car. The muffler must have gone out long ago, because it sounded like a tank.

I tried to figure out why anyone would need to be up that early every day. I thought maybe they worked an early shift at Boeing, or perhaps they worked graveyard at a convenience store and were just getting off work.

My boyfriend worked it out, though. My neighbors two houses down either just got a newspaper subscription, or the carrier changed, because the person with the lousy muffler is their newspaper delivery person. I'll be damned, I thought. You mean this asshole is going to come by every freakin' morning to wake me up!?

I tried to come up with a solution in a calm fashion. I tried running a fan at night for background noise. Didn't work. I tried putting in earplugs, in addition to the fan. No dice. Next, I tried the fan, the earplugs and an eye mask that my mom gave me that she got for free on flight from Europe. (I thought the eye mask would help, since it gets light at 5am now, thanks to daylight savings.) Keep in mind that I also wear a bite guard at night, because I grind my teeth. So with my new night-time get-up, instead of feeling like the Dirty Thirty year old that I am, I feel like an old hag that scares little children. All I need are a couple glass eyes and hook for a hand, and my look would be complete.

After the fan and the earplugs failed me, I tried calling the newspaper customer service number. The first lady that I talked to was really nice, but she didn't get the job done. Crappy compact car was still plaguing me. So I called again. And again. The next two customer service ladies both told me that they couldn't help me since I didn't have an account number. Fuck me! They said I could have my neighbor call or call the police.

So I called the 911, just like they suggested. I don't think the dispatcher felt too sorry for me, but she said, "I'll see what we can do." I don't know if they caught the marauding paper person, but I'll find out tomorrow.

I'm a freakin' insomniac now, people! It's totally messing up my day. I wake up with creases on my face from the cheap airline eye mask. My mouth is dry from the fan blowing all night and my ears hurt from the earplugs being wedged down into my ear canal, because I'm a side sleeper.

If that fucker is there tomorrow, so help me, I am going to run out in the street and scare the living shit out of him. He is going to pay for taking away the one free thing that gives me unlimited joy, besides sex. But without sleep, I'm not feeling very sexy, or very awake. The bottom line is, I need a full night's sleep because I'm starting to get kind of crazy. So if you read about a newspaper delivery person that was beaten to death with an oscillating fan by a deranged woman with an eye patch and a bite guard...it wasn't me.