Today's Topic

It’s definitely not diarrhea.

My topic today is: Why we’re not getting enough sleep.

That was not originally going to be my topic. Originally my topic was going to be explosive diarrhea, which I apologize for even mentioning, but it has been in the news a LOT. Explosive diarrhea is everywhere. You can’t escape it! (By “it,” I mean the topic of explosive diarrhea.)

Let’s say you’re interested in reading about federal legislation, so you go to the website of The Hill, a respected publication covering Congress, expecting to read about congressional matters such as bills and hearings. Here’s one of the headlines that will greet you:

Beneath this headline is a Nexstar story explaining, in explicit detail, what explosive diarrhea is, as if you couldn’t figure that out for yourself from the fact that it’s called “explosive diarrhea.” And this is on a website that’s supposed to be about Congress.

OK, maybe that makes some sense. But you get my point. My point is, lately we have all been WAY overexposed to this story, and especially the phrase “explosive diarrhea.” So you will be relieved to know that I’ve decided not to write about it this week. Because there is nothing funny about explosive diarrhea. It’s a serious problem, as we see on this map from the Centers for Disease Control, with the shaded area showing the parts of the country currently being affected:

Yes, this thing is big, and it has people really scared about what foods are safe. Just yesterday in Dallas a man was able to rob a bank simply by threatening to expose the teller to a product containing shredded lettuce. (”DO WHAT HE SAYS, MARCIA! HE HAS A CHALUPA!”)

But seriously, explosive diarrhea is no laughing matter. I speak from personal experience. I had this experience in 2014 in Russia, where my pal and co-author Ridley Pearson and I were on a ten-day visit as official cultural representatives of the U.S. State Department. Since you may not believe me — and I don’t blame you — here’s a photo of Ridley and me with the U.S. ambassador to Russia at the time, John Tefft, and his dog, Lui (third from left) who thought I tasted pretty great.

Ridley and I were visiting Russia as part of the State Department’s American Writers Series program, which was intended to improve U.S. relations with other nations. (Pause for laughter.) One night in Moscow we were coming back from an event, and we were hungry, so we decided to eat dinner at a restaurant near our hotel that specialized in Mexican cuisine.

IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: If you ever go to Russia, do not eat the Mexican cuisine. If I’m being brutally honest, the Russians aren’t particularly good at Russian cuisine. But they’re really not good at Mexican. I say this because I ate what I soon realized was a weaponized chimichanga. It did NOT agree with me. It HATED me. You talk about explosive; I was emanating tremors detectible in Japan.

As you might imagine, it was not easy being a cultural ambassador with that level of intestinal turmoil going on. Ridley and I were doing these events wherein we talked to Russian audiences about what it was like to be American authors, and I think the main impression the Russians got was that some American authors frequently, with no warning, sprint out of the room. I’m not saying this is the entire reason why relations between the United States and Russia subsequently went into the toilet, so to speak. But it was probably a factor.

I had to seek medical treatment over there, which was challenging because the Russians have a different approach to medicinal dosage. Whereas in America you get your medicine divided up into multiple small pills, in Russia, apparently as an efficiency measure, they put it all into one big pill. Here’s an AI rendering of my memory of the pill I was given in Russia, shown next to a standard kayak for scale.

The good news was, the pill worked well enough that I was able to take a plane home from Russia without having to be forcibly ejected over the North Atlantic by the flight crew as a health precaution. But overall it was an unpleasant experience, and definitely not a laughing matter. Neither is this outbreak of explosive diarrhea that we’re having, which is why I decided not to make it my topic today, my goal being to spare you a bunch of juvenile toilet humor involving the gratuitous repetition of the phrase “explosive diarrhea.” You’re welcome.

What I am going to write about is today’s topic, which as you no doubt recall is:

Why We’re Not Getting Enough Sleep

Americans are not getting enough sleep. This is not just my opinion; this is the finding of a recent study that I am too tired to look up right now.

No, that’s a joke. I’m actually too lazy. But the gist of the study was, we’re not sleeping enough, and this is bad. Because humans need sleep. In fact all animals do, except for small children seated directly behind you on overnight flights.

Why do you need sleep? For one thing, sleeping gives your body an opportunity to perform vital biological maintenance functions, such as cementing your eyelids shut with eyeball boogers and making your breath smell like you ate an uncooked roadkill squirrel. But sleep is equally important for your mental health. Your brain uses the “down time” to sort through the massive amount of information it acquired during the day so it can discard anything that might conceivably prove to be useful, such as the fact that you left the oven on; this is how your brain makes sure it will always have space to store the lyrics to verse two of the 1963 Beach Boys car song “Custom Machine,” which are (I quote from memory):

Naugahyde bucket seats front and back

CHECK MY CUSTOM MACHINE!

Everything is chrome, man, even my jack

CHECK MY CUSTOM MACHINE!

So sleep is vital, but Americans are not getting enough of it. Why is this? Far be it from me to point the finger of blame at any one specific sex or gender, but a big part of the problem is women. Hear me out. If you ask an average man what he needs in the way of bedding, he’s going to say he needs sheets, blankets and maybe a couple of pillows. Something like this:

This is an efficient setup for a bed. You can get into it within seconds and immediately commence sleeping. If men were in charge of home decor, this is what the typical bed would look like, except it would have ketchup stains.

But very often men are NOT in charge of home decor. Which is why many beds look more like this:

This is not a staged photo. This is a photo I took of an actual bed that I slept in last week in the guest bedroom of a home owned by lovely people whom I love and am in no way making fun of here.

You can’t just climb into a bed like that. You must first deconstruct the massive defensive fortification of decorative pillows that somebody, who is definitely a woman, has painstakingly arranged and plumped up and dimpled. You also have to figure out what to DO with all these pillows. You cannot, as a houseguest, simply shove them onto the floor; that would be rude, like getting water on the decorative guest soap, or putting waste into the completely empty, sparkling-clean, mint-condition guest wastebasket that you could safely eat spaghetti out of, so there’s no way you’re going to besmirch it with your used Kleenex, which you will end up taking home in your suitcase.

No, in order to use this bed you must carefully, one at a time, remove all the decorative pillows and find a safe place to stack them. You may find it easier to leave the pillows in place and sleep on the floor. But one way or another, you’re going to have to deal with the pillows, and while you’re doing that, guess what you’re not doing. That’s right: You’re not sleeping.

The bed I sleep in at home is not as formidable as the one in the photo, but it is guarded by decorative pillows, which I have to remove every night before I can use the bed as a bed. I dislike these pillows; Michelle likes them. So we discussed it, and we decided, as a compromise between two caring people of equal importance in the relationship, to completely disregard my feelings. Which is fine! I’m simply pointing out that every night I have to spend time dealing with these pillows — time that I could be using for sleep. Granted, we’re talking about only a few seconds per night, but if we multiply those seconds by 365 nights per year, times the number of men who find themselves involved, often against their will, in decorative-bed-pillow relationships, we’re talking about a nationwide annual total of (this is an estimate) a LOT of lost sleep.

I’m not saying this is as big a problem as the explosive diarrhea, which is a topic for another day. I’m just saying that women are insane it’s something we should consider, as a nation. Thank you.

And now we turn for wisdom and guidance to you always thoughtful paying subscribers, starting with three scientific polls: