The Duffer

by Ian Robinson        April 2003

DUFFER ……..doggone it

By Ian Robinson  

So there I lay, lifelong insomniac that I am, awake at 4 a.m. and wondering why I can’t sleep. The only answer that makes any real sense is that God may not like me very much.

Understandable.

I mean. He made a world that includes Wayne Gretzky, the genius who came up with the polio vaccine, Mother Teresa and the guy who invented Velcro. Pretty cool world populated with pretty cool people, right?

Compared to them, I am not exactly one of the Big Guy’s Greatest Hits.

Jeez. Compared to the guy who invented the Ronco Pocket Fisherman I’m not exactly a Greatest Hit.

After all, my favourite things do NOT include selflessly helping my fellow humans, curing diseases, bringing grace and style to the national game or coming up with an easy way for little kids to fasten their sneakers.

Let’s face it. I’m like most of you reading this.

Selflessly helping others, curing diseases?

Get real.

In my fantasy life, all I want is a big screen plasma TV, to play golf well enough that my buddies quit suggesting I swing from the ladies’ tee, and to be 16 and single again and locked in a broom closet with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Lopez and a big drum of peanut oil. (The reason I picked peanut oil, as opposed to olive oil, is that you can increase its temperature through such things as friction without it emulsifying, which means the oil doesn’t get thick and nasty like mayonnaise. Watching the Food Channel pays off in ways you can hardly imagine, don’t it?)

In my real life, my favourite things involve eating fried chicken and e-mailing twisted midget pornography ( As opposed to what? The nice, normal midget pornography that you can show your mom?) to the teachers who annoyed me in high school.

Which is pretty much all of them.

OK, and watching TV, even though it isn’t big screen. And quaffing beers. And some other stuff that I don’t really want to go into.

Actually that’s a lie. I’d love to go into it but my wife reads this thing and she’d do me serious bodily harm if I talked about how I love to play Pirate and Virgin and …OW!

Anyway, there I lie, lifelong insomniac etc …

And it occurs to me that what I need to help me sleep is exercise. Good, honest exercise. This is the purest self-deception because, after a lifetime of living through this crap, to get to sleep I have tried exercise, prescription sleeping pills, red wine, hot milk, opium in a liquid suspension (it was a prescription for something else), hot baths, wild sex, dull sex, solitary sex, counting sheep, counting midgets, counting pornographic midgets, reading --- and nothing works.

I have even tried these cures in tandem. As in: red wine and prescription sleeping pills. Sex and opium. Exercise and counting midgets.

You get the idea.

And nada. Nothing. Not a thing.

When in the grips of insomnia, I can ingest enough legal and illegal pharmaceuticals to kill an elephant and still be wide-awake and raving.

I just get really weird.

But I keep trying because, hey, I’m not very smart, OK?

So I get up and throw a couple of 25-pound plates on my 10-pound bar and change into workout clothes. I know it’s not a lot of weight. Twenty years ago I could bench a bunch more. It was not a great accomplishment.

Mostly it just hurt a lot. I’m 45 years old now. I do light weights and excruciatingly slow reps because I DO NOT WISH TO DO MYSELF AN INJURY.

Get that? I am sensible and sane and smart. No injuries. OK?

So there I am, part way through a bench press and my idiot chocolate Labrador retriever --- his name is Gunner --- walks into the room and takes his wet and cold nose and jams it up the leg of my shorts and --- did I mention I was working out commando? ---- puts it against my bits. My favourite bits.

It is not a bit receptive to the wet cold touch of a doggie nose.

And, in a very manly and masculine fashion, I am sure, I said: Eeek.

That’s right. I said Eeek. And I’m proud of it.

OK. No I’m not.

But, Eeek was said.

And I kind of jumped. And the bar started to list to the left. And because it was 4 a.m. and I didn’t want to wake up the entire household, I didn’t just dump the bar, I clenched up, got control and fought it back and racked it. And sat up.

Or, rather, tried to sit up. Because instead of doing what I wanted them to do, the torn muscles from armpit to waist go into spasm and I basically lock up. I roll off the bench onto the floor and do my best not to cry. By 6 a.m. I can stand again. I totter to a chair. And wait until my wife gets up at 8. Bum a ride to the doctor. Doctor gives me proper hell.

“Look at you!” she cries. “You can’t even lift your arm to your shoulder! What were you doing?”

“Exercising.”

“You’re doing it wrong!”

No freaking kidding. I can’t muster up the strength to tell her about the dog.

She prescribes me a drug that’s a cross between a Tylenol-3 and a muscle relaxant. Apparently, this is a drug that destroys human judgment. It will put me straight to sleep, she says. There is no way I’ll be able to stay conscious, which is a good thing because it will give my muscles a chance to heal.

So I fill the prescription. Take the pills.

At this point – wide awake with enough dope in me to tranquillize a moose – I’m thinking that there’s one thing I haven’t tried to sleep.