Preface To Number One Radio Show: What Is Sleep Anyway?

Do you get a good night's sleep?  Like, maybe six or seven or eight hours of sleep a night?  Really?  What's that like?

If you can indulge me, I'd like to describe an average couple of days - Sunday through Tuesday, so three days - for me.  By the way, there are many ways these days could be organized differently, but that would require foresight by yours truly, & that's not happening.

I wake after a probably drunken sleep Sunday morning.  Hey!  It was Saturday night!

I spend most of the day (there are dogwalks & hopefully a nap & I have to make dinner as well) working on Self Help Radio.  If you don't listen to the show - & maybe if you do - you're not aware of the work I put into the silly interviews, the selection of songs, the somewhat-amusing interstitial pieces.  It takes a while.  I haven't come up with a good system for all this.  I wish I could.  I have tried lots of things.  None seems more streamlined than another.

Usually I get to bed around ten or maybe eleven pm on Sunday nights.  This hurts a little, because it has meant, since I got my Freeform show, I miss John Oliver.  I can see him on Monday but for some reason I like to see things live or mostly live.  Anyway.  We make sacrifices.

What happens is I sleep a fitful few hours.  I wake at 4am, I shower, I gather my things, I head out to Freeform, which is north of here, & about fifteen to twenty minutes away, at 5am.  I stop to get a soda at a 7-11, I like to have a little caffeine, but I am there twenty or so minutes early.  It's who I am.  Don't judge me.

The show happens.  I hope it goes well.  The show that follows mine is awesome & I chat with the deejay.  I drive home, it's 8am, I avoid the highway.  I get home around 8:30.  If the wife is home, we walk the dogs.  Mostly she walks the dogs while I am on the radio.

Around 9:30 I feed my animals.  At some point I have lunch.  It's a haze around that time.  Did I lunch or feed the animals?  Have they eaten me?  I fed them, then.

For two hours - after lunch - I sleep.  It's not always noon to two, but it's around then.  It's not entirely restful or pleasant but it's necessary.  I sometimes oversleep.  I sometimes don't.  What do you want from me?

When I wake, I need to work on my show from XRAY.  Before that, though, I edit my Self Help Radio episode for the website, & write on this here blog, &etc.  I have a rough recording that I have to edit.  I don't change anything about the airbreaks - how could I?  You hear the show as it happened.

The XRAY show gets my attention.  Then, at some point, it's evening, the wife is home, I make dinner, there's the requisite dogwalk.

Sometimes I have the XRAY show done around the time I feed the kids, 9:30 or so.  Sometimes I don't.  Sometimes I can nap from ten to midnight.  Sometimes I don't.

Around 1am, I gather stuff & head out to XRAY (which is across the street from Freeform), & I program the show Sugar Substitute.  I am done at 4am, I head home.

Mostly I get maybe two or three hours sleep before I am awakened for the morning dogwalk.  Some Tuesdays I don't get to go back to sleep until the evening, some Tuesdays I nap after lunch.  But mostly I operate on very little sleep.

Is this sustainable?  Next week I am subbing a show on KBOO on Wednesday night/Thursday morning from midnight to 3am.  When am I supposed to sleep?  What is a good night's sleep, anyway?  As I have grown older, my dreams have gotten more vivid, memorable, & confusing.  I think I enter REM sleep right after I conk out.

Is it because for three or four days of the week, my sleep is erratic & limited?  I wish I knew.