I spent this week at a work-related conference in the city where it was expected that I went out with colleagues every night until the late hours. This is tougher for me than for most people, because I have never been a night owl. I never once pulled an all-nighter in either college or graduate school, because I knew that the analytical and creative parts of my brain start shutting down around 10 p.m.  Any essay I wrote at 3 a.m. would have had all the rhetorical clarity of a Dali painting.

One late night is enough to put me in a daze the next day; doing it five nights in a row is enough for me to start speaking in tongues.  I’m pretty sure this affects my system the way a series of knockout blows affected Muhammad Ali.  In a few years, I expect to start slurring and be even more unable to do basic math than I already am.  And really, I have no idea how I’m going to transition into being an old man because my sleep patterns are already pretty elderly.  What am I going to do, progressively go to sleep an hour earlier every night until I fall asleep an hour after I wake up?  That cycle is the single thing that scares me most about growing old--well, that and wearing nothing but plaid.

I think it was environment that made me this way.  I grew up in a woodsy area about three miles outside of a small town.  Even when the lights were on in our house, the lush, quiet darkness made you want to go to sleep early. It’s the same with eskimos. One of them says “Let’s go clubbing!” and the others say “No, man, we’re in the Arctic,” and they eventually just catch some fish and hit the sack.

Similarly, my house was small enough that I’d often be awakened early by the low, burbly conversations of the parental units as their voices wafted up from the first floor.  I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying to each other at 6 a.m., but it was probably something like:

“Do you ever feel guilty that raising Greg in this environment means that he’ll never be able to pull an all-nighter or stay up late five nights in a row?”

“Don’t worry, honey.  I predict that certain helpful tools will become trendy and ubiquitous in the decades to come--such as coffee shops, energy drinks, and meth.”

One thing I notice is that my mind reacts to lack of sleep the same way it does when I’m about to finish an especially long run: some inane thought gets stuck in my head and loops around like the chorus of an annoying pop song. In the case of the past week, I kept thinking “Charlie Sheen may not be much of an actor, but you have to admit that he’s had a lot of sex. Ironically, I bet the only thing he hasn’t done is Two and Half Men.”