I love specialty blogs. I love writing this blog. (Miraculously, after two years of writing down things that happen to a boring Florida housewife, stuff that happened to me in a small Ohio town in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and things I read on the Internet, I’m still entertaining the heck out of myself. Sometimes I sit at this computer and laugh out loud. I crack me up.) But sometimes I wish I was highly specialized like the lady who writes Sleep Talkin’ Man.
Sleep Talkin’ Man, if you haven’t seen it, is written by this British lady, whose husband has a sleep disorder and who is crazy insane and someday will kill her in his sleep. In the meantime, she’s milking her short, tragic life for all it’s worth and publishing everything he says while he sleeps.
The guy is certifiable, not to mention a potty mouth. According to his wife, he’s a mild mannered British guy by day, but once his head hits the pillow, his Eve Black comes out and he’s a vulgar, angry, talkative super villain. His wife had an insomniatic night once and – EUREKA! – heard the first menacing threat, started typing, went viral and is now a famous blogger who stays up all night listening to her husband’s one-man show. I think she can now safely say she “married well.”
She tells him that she’s blogging about his night rants and he’s fine with it. Sure, because during the day he’s calm and reasonable. He claims he doesn’t even know the meanings of some of the words he uses during the night.
“What’s a doofus?” he asked her after reading one of her posts. He’s British, remember, and many of our words don’t survive the trip across the puddle. Besides ‘doofus,’ the Brits haven’t yet learned the word ‘sweater’ and insist on calling it a ‘jumper.’
Sleep Talkin’ Man particularly hates vegetarians and lentils (the lentils even when he’s awake). But whoever he’s addressing is toast, I’m telling you. Here’s one of the few examples I can print here in my PG 13 blog:
My son turned me onto Sleep Talkin’ Man and ever since I’ve been thinking about my friend’s husband who had a similar night personality. Except instead of just having Tourettes-in-your-sleep, his whole body was involved. His regular personality was very normal. He was nice, funny, very handsome, and he had that way of using your name and looking straight into your eyes when he spoke, that made you feel like you were special and wanted to purchase something from him. Just a generally nice guy.
Then he and his wife came to my apartment in Coshocton, Ohio, to visit one weekend. And he didn’t just sleepwalk. He sleep ran through my small, one-room Mary Richards apartment, crashing into furniture, stepping on me, who was in a sleeping bag on the floor, knocking over the lighter fluffier things in the place, breaking dishes, bursting into the kitchen, tagging the wall there, and sprinting blindly back again. The whole time he was swearing like an angry newspaper editor on deadline and threatening someone’s life. He was going to kill some gee-dee em-effer, he swore. This went on for a few laps, until his wife sat up in bed and yelled at him, harshly, to get back into bed.
I was stunned. What causes someone to let out all of their pent-up anger during the night? Isn’t wetting the bed just easier on everybody?
Makes me feel bad for complaining about my husband’s snoring. Although what has he done to get me a viral blog and make me famous in four continents?
Maybe I didn’t marry as well as I thought.