crapapult

My friends from New England often make fun of the concept of falling asleep at the wheel. I’ve driven through Connecticut enough to understand why. This is the story I tell to help them better understand how it happens. This really did happen to me on I-35 from Austin to Dallas, which has some of the longest, flattest, straightest stretches of road I’ve ever seen.

…

You have to know you’ve already exhausted every trick you can remember for staying awake. You’ve played the radio as loud as you can, you’ve taken off your shoes, you’ve rolled all the windows down.. You’ve pulled over at two rest stops; spent time slapping yourself in the face and stomping your feet around. Nothing is working. Jiminey Cricket is screaming at you to stop the car. You, the big man, brush him aside as you press on to Yeknod Isle.

So you set onto the road, unaware of how debilitated your decision making process is. You pass a sign that says 12 miles to the 35 East/West split, which is as good as home (it is, in fact, not). You turn off the radio because you can’t hear your own voice as you talk to yourself. You start doing the numbers in your head, about 70 miles at 70 mph means another hour on the road.

You push the car up to 90 mph figuring that you can cut about 12 minutes off your time. If you get pulled over, you’ll explain to Smokey that you were speeding in order to decrease the time you would be on the road, and thus less time that you’re a danger to others. He might even give you a police escort once he hears that.

Now you’ve come to it. You’re doing 90 in a straight line, with no hills or valleys, no lights on the road except those from your own car. You blink your eyes once, and they stay closed just slightly longer than you wanted. A little shock comes over you: partially because you had your eyes closed, partially because having them closed really, really felt good.

Rationalizing that the shock keeps you awake, and the comfort got you a little farther, you are now completely screwed. Orpheus and his lyre could not keep you from where you’re going next. Your mind wanders. Someone told me Isaac Newton would fall asleep on his desk while holding a steel ball - when the ball hit the ground he would wake up. He theorized that was all the sleep a body needed.

On this straight unending road, you count to 5 out loud and figure how far you’ve gone. You squint your eyes, seeing that the road doesn’t turn at all in that same counted distance ahead. Then you do it: you hold your hands still, close your eyes, and start counting.

One
Two
Three..

Four
Five

You find yourself sitting in a field on a cool spring day. The wheat is young and it brushes against your shoulders with the breeze. The sun is setting in an eruption of reds and oranges and pinks. It’s a breathtaking view. You look at the bear sitting next to you. He looks at you.

“What’s going on?”, you pleasantly offer.

“Oh nothing, hanging out”, he says just as cordially, “what are you doing?”

“I’m heading home to see my fam..”

“Oh F@#!” you scream, popping open your eyes just in time to keep the car drifting into the median.

…

I rarely finish this story because it’s at this point others want to comment on their experiences with driving, or with bears. The real end of the story fails in terms of setting a good example. I was so scared at the sight of nearly ditching that I started to hyperventilate. The resulting adrenaline got me the rest of the way home, and I regretted what I had done starting the very next morning.

Next time, as N and I now say, pull over and watch the sunset with the bears.

I’ve been drowning in a work project lately. It involves writing a very long, very detailed document, and I can never seem to get ahead. Documentation is the antithesis of coding. Where coding is intended to take a very large set of instructions and minimize them into a clean, minimal file. Documentation is to take a simple thing and explode it into the most grandiose and spoon-fed details possible.

While I was doing all of this, my little sister had gastric bypass surgery, which means she will also have to quit smoking, and of course she and her husband filed for divorce two weeks ago. I’m suddenly stricken with the idea that writing documentation isn’t so bad.

I spent almost all of the day continuing work on a Styleguide for one of our clients. I harken back to ‘00 when I started as a lowly HTML editor and was invited into design reviews. Everyone around me talked about emphasis and balance and negative space, while I kept quiet and looked at it thinking only of, “look at all those curves.. how the hell am I supposed to grid out those curves?” Now I find myself on the other end, writing a document explaining how to handle all the elements, and having a lot of pity for whomever has to code this thing. Of course, I’m also hoping I’m not that person.

In the middle of the day, my little sister called me to tell me that she’s getting a divorce. She wanted my advice not just because I’m her big brother, but because our dad divorced my mom when I was my nephews age. The situation has forced her to take the dog to a rescue agency, and she’s scheduled to have surgery next Monday. It’s not a great time there. I called every other member of my family to be sure there weren’t any other crisis’ that I didn’t know about.

Going back to writing the guide, somewhere around hour 11 I started to get a little off. I have a little bit of code that I write in a WYSIWYG editor that helps check fonts in Photoshop compared to CSS. I never save it, I just write it out pretty quickly any time I’m doing this sort of work. I was stricken with how much space in bytes that code takes up on my hard drive, vs. how much space it takes up in my head. I really, really hope my head has a more efficient storage system.

This was a bit random wasn’t it? It’s a good representation of the day.