Gloved and Crazy

Sometimes you read bizarre stories about reclusive or eccentric celebrity behavior and find yourself asking, “How does someone who was at one time a relatively normal and functional human being get that crazy?”

Whether it’s Brittney Spears shaving her head and vandalizing cars with an umbrella, Michael Jackson forcing his kids to wear a mask in public, or Mike Tyson spending days at a time tending to pigeon coups with a bizarre African symbol tattooed on the side of his face, the question you always find yourself asking is, “How did it come to this?”

Well I’m here to tell you, I know how it happens. And I think I’m on my way there…

You see I have this little sleeping issue that I can’t quite figure out… What happens is, at night as I lay down in bed, I have a habit of resting my head against the palm of my hand. It started a few years back when I saw a commercial on TV for an orthopedic pillow. The commercial featured a graphic showing that if your head wasn’t resting in just the right position when you lay down to sleep, your spine would somehow be bent in an a very awkward. This would of course cause you a lifetime of permanent pain and discomfort.

Whether or not that graphic was accurate, I thought about it that night when I went to bed. I tossed and turned for hours, obsessed with finding the perfect position to rest my head. I finally settled on a sleeping position using the heel of my hand to prop my head up just slight off my pillow… the “perfect position” to align my spine.

This went on for a couple of weeks, and although I had since realized that the graphic was just some BS sales tool, I had grown accustomed to that position, and I’ve slept that way ever since. It was has to be perfect… On my left side… Two pillows… My left hand resting beneath my left temple… I can’t sleep any other way.

But the problem with sleeping like this is, when I wake up in the morning I have a big red spot on the side of head, right where I had rested my hand all night… It used to go away within 10 or 15 minutes, but over time it seems to stay longer and longer… Sometimes it will stay with me until mid morning.

There have even been a few occasions where coworkers have asked me “what happened to you? Your temple is all red, did you get into a fight or something?”

I’m starting to worry that the spot may become permanent.

I’ve tried many times to simply change the way I sleep, but nothing works. If I sleep on my right side or on my back I can only sleep for a couple of hours before waking up. I’ve tried wrapping a blanket or sheet around my hand to provide some cushion for my head, but it always slips out once I fall asleep.

The closest I’ve been able to come to an actual solution is put my hand inside the pillow cover and use the pillow cover as the barrier between my hand and face… But even when I do that I always wake up in the middle of the night to find that I have at some point ditched the pillow cover and returned to my normal, harmful position.

The one idea that I’m sure will work (but have thus far been reluctant to try) is a glove…

But this morning I woke up and stumbled into the bathroom only to see that the spot on my face was much larger than normal, and darker than it’s ever been… Even right now, as I type, FIVE hours after I woke up this morning, the spot is still slightly visible. Its light brown, about the size of a penny… And indeed, it looks like I might have been punched in the temple at some bar fight last weekend.

So fuck it, I’m going to the glove… I don’t care how crazy or irrational it sounds, but I’m going to bed tonight with a latex glove on my left hand… Go ahead… Get a good mental picture… a six foot tall, pasty white fat guy, with a shaved head, half naked, lying in bed, and wearing one latex glove...

I just wanted to let everyone know about it right now, so that in five years when you're reading a blog post from Moe Greene telling everyone that I’ve locked myself in my bedroom, shaved off every hair on my body, and refuse to touch anything without wearing my glove… you’ll know where it started.

You won’t have to ask “How did it come to this?”