Do You Sleep Quietly?

I was up at 5:30 am the other day and went for a stroll around Mill Lake. I captured the early light in the above photo, but that is not what I want to write about today. I was careful not to wake busylizzy when I arose, and was thinking about that as I was walking. I then recalled a chapter out of the book I am currently reading and began to laugh out loud as I was walking down the trail. Fortunately, there were not too many other early walkers so nobody was there to think I was mentally unstable.

I will give a review of the latest Bill Bryson book I am reading, but here is an excerpt, in the meanwhile, about sleeping, that I think is quite funny. The author has just arrived in Australia and is being given a tour in car, on a warm day, and feeling the effects of jet lag.

" I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people, when they nod off, look like they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as though injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside-tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air-decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those bobble-head toys, my head tips forwards to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, than falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that brings to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mother's hems. It is a terrible burden to bear."