To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ... From Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
While most of you heathens were taking part in the drunken revelry that accompanies degenerate New Year’s Eve celebrations, your boy T. Michael Stone spent the final hours of 2024 and the first hours of 2025 in the womb of misery and woe.
As you recall, New Year’s Eve was on a Tuesday night. At that point, I had not slept since Friday, and my health was lamentable.
I felt awful. I expected to soon cough up one or both of my lungs along with any peripheral organs not securely attached to blood vessels or bones.
Although I desperately needed sleep, I was terrified of the nightmares that could be spawned in the strange and unpredictable regions of my weary subconscious mind.
My predicament reminded me of a “Twilight Zone” episode entitled “Perchance to Dream.”
In that story, according to imdb.com, “a fatigued man fights to stay awake as he explains to a psychiatrist that if he falls asleep, it will trigger a nightmare, which will cause his heart to fail.”
I won't spoil it since TZ episodes conclude with a twist ending.
Eventually, I gave up on sleeping and returned to the living room.
I sat back down on the sofa and turned the television back on. Since I don’t have cable, satellite, or any popular streaming services, I decided to look for a movie on YouTube.
I scrolled through several dozen pages of flicks until a movie poster and its foreboding catchphrase caught my eye: “From the bowels of the Earth come ... The Slime People.”
And no, it wasn’t about Senate Democrats.
It turned out to be a cheesy science fiction film about subterranean reptile men who imprison the citizens of Los Angeles using an impenetrable fog. Today, you can achieve the same effect by tossing lit Marlboros into the brush east of Pacific Palisades.
The film's true hero was an elegant 1959 Mercury Voyager station wagon with a 430 cubic inch Marauder V8. The reliable Voyager started right up every time it was needed, but two white dudes were given credit for dispatching the Slime People. They disabled the fog machine, causing the reptile men to die as a result of climate change — Los Angeles got too hot for slimy people.
If only it were that simple.
I knew I needed medical help in the worst way when I started to consider writing a newspaper column about needing medical assistance.
Criminy! Not another newspaper column!
In the end, I decided to go to the ER at St. Mary’s Good Samaritan Hospital, which, by the way, has a phenomenal staff.
Fortunately, most people don’t visit the ER on New Year’s Day due to hangovers, so when I arrived at the hospital, I didn’t have to wait long.
My name was called, and I walked resolutely through a door into the chamber of horrors.
I was weighed like a bag of grapes, and my finger was attached to a tachometer that counted my heartbeats.
These heartbeat numbers seemed to concern the nurses, who led me to a room where I was instructed to remove my shirt and lie down on the bed. Under normal circumstances, I would have been exceptionally pleased with two attractive female healthcare professionals asking me to get in bed, but these weren’t normal circumstances.
Soon, the nurses began sticking needles in both of my arms, and one shoved something up my nose so far that my hair got longer.
IVs were connected, and, presently, ER Dr. Harold Gage entered the room and explained that my heart was redlining. Drugs were being employed to slow down my heart, but he suggested that I might have to stay in the hospital overnight.
It was not my first choice. “Be still, my heart, be still,” I thought, trying to subdue the out-of-control organ thundering in my chest. But asking my heart to do anything other than what it wants to do is futile. Any of my old girlfriends will attest to that.
So, I lay there looking at the clock on the wall and hoping I would not fall in love with one of the nurses before I was released.
To be continued ... Selah.