La cosa loca

I feel like I've written a lot recently about sleeping and sleepiness, but that's not going to stop me from relating yet another tale for your reading enjoyment (I hope). I'm in Miami for business right now, and the first night and following morning of a trip back east always pose a problem for me.

You see, I have to get up at 6 or 7 something in the morning for meetings, and I know that it will feel like 3 or 4 something in the morning because I won't have fully adjusted to the time difference. So I try to combat this by going to bed early, but it quickly becomes midnight and I'm wide awake because it's only 9pm to my internal clock. Then I start playing the whole "if I fall asleep right now, I'll get x number of hours" game, and I'm pretty sure I've never won that one.

Can't I just pretend that's the real time and trick my body into going to bed at 11 and get a good number of hours in? No, my internal clock isn't tricked so easily. It knows things, and my cunning attempts at trickery are always rebuffed and met with unwavering resolve. Stupid stubborn internal clock. Regardless, when I woke up after a solid four-plus hours of sleep, something happened that led me to today's particular Sleepy Klein story:

Over the course of five or six years, the same thing would happen about 90% of my mornings. I would be in the shower, and then I'd notice that there would be a song in my head. Every single time, it was the same exact song: "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc. For those of you not familiar with the song, it's basically a rap in which Mr. Loc repeatedly tells us that he enjoys sexual intercourse and not, as you may have assumed, a remake of the oldie by The Troggs. It includes such beautifully-crafted lines as, "Couldn't get her off my jock, she was like, like static cling/But that's what happens when bodies start slappin' from doin' the wild thing." And to be fair, it's this song that introduced the world to "Hasta la vista, baby," later further popularized on the big screen by some Austrian actor who has since faded from the limelight.

For the first couple of years that this happened, I never gave it much thought as to why that same song was in my head almost every morning. I thought it was amusing that I kept getting "Wild Thing" in my head so often and didn't wonder too much about the cause of it. Then I did start to wonder, and it was killing me. I'd be in the shower, notice it in my head (usually in the third verse already), and think, "Dammit, why are you here?!?" It never answered. I told people about this problem, hoping someone would say, "Oh yeah, I get that too, it's because..." No such luck.

And then it happened. After at least five years of this occurring (honestly about 90% of my mornings), I was in a work meeting discussing a project that would be challenging to implement. I went back to my desk and found that "Wild Thing" was in my head. Quickly, I replayed everything that had just happened in the end of the meeting, and by Jove I got it: At the end, I said to my boss, "Alright, let's do it." Aha! "Wild Thing" starts with Tone Loc saying, "Lezz do it!" I further connected the dots and realized that in my sleepy state, I need a little pep talk to get out of bed. Apparently, that little pep talk to myself was consistently in the form of "Let's do it." My subconscious took that phrase and continued with the song that followed.

Once I figured that out, the song appeared less and less frequently. But after a shorter than planned rest here in Miami, I guess I needed all the help I could get. Thank you, Tone Loc. Without you, I might still be in bed, and more importantly, I might not know what to do when a woman tells me, "I need fifty dollars to make you holler/I get paid to do the wild thing."