Waking up early to go through hell

I woke up this morning at 3:30, which is officially freaking early. My first thought the moment the first of my four alarms went off was, "Dear God, please let me fall asleep on the airplane."

I decided to get revenge on The Wife for abandoning me for five days in Vegas by leaving by myself for ... Newport News, Virginia. Because airlines are sadistic bastards the only way I could get from Minneapolis to Newport News via air was to take the 6 a.m. flight. That's early enough, but the possibility of getting strip-searched before my flight requires that I be at the airport two hours beforehand (that and I need to satisfy my intense paranoia about missing a flight).

Thus I got up at 3:30 a.m. On most weekend nights it's not uncommon for me to still be awake at 3:30 a.m., I shouldn't have to be getting up at that time of the morning. I hate getting up early in the morning. I hate flying. Combine the two and you have one cranky dork.

Yet I was too groggy to be cranky this morning. I could barely blurt out my name while checking in my luggage. I just dumbly said, "HUH?" when the security guard asked for my ID. I didn't even raise my voice when the security guard giving me a strip search started using a rubber glove and some apparently experienced probing skills. I was just too tired.

You'd think that, at 5 a.m. and extremely groggy, I'd at least have a bloodhound-like nose for hot coffee. Yet when my fellow passengers walked passed me with large cups of sweet, sweet java I just mumbled to myself that it would be too far a walk and slumped back into my seat to listen to some blond CNN anchor talk about that creepy Austrian dungeonmaster with just a little bit too much pep in her voice. I did manage to groan to myself, "Man, if I had to wake up to that voice every morning I'd beat myself with a baseball bat."

But the people who really made me mad were the guys near me on the airplane who could fall asleep.

I hate those people.

Why? Because I can't fall asleep on a moving vehicle. It's difficult enough for me to fall asleep in a warm, cozy and comfortable bed. It's extremely difficult for me to fall asleep in a car or in a comfortable bus seat in Ireland after getting exactly two hours of sleep over the previous 48. It is entirely impossible for me to get any sleep in a seat that was clearly designed by Lilliputian airplane engineer with a really bad attitude.

Nevertheless, the guy next to me managed to sleep even while hanging his head in various positions that would give me a headache for a month. And another guy behind us managed to just fold his arms and get some shut-eye. How do those people do it? Come to think of it, how does my wife do it? And how could a guy fall asleep who is on the phone answering an emergency, 911 phone call?

But it wasn't all a loss. I got to spend two hours listening to a pair of flight attendants work toward their goal of belittling every single passenger on the airplane on our way to Philadelphia. And I was awake enough to see the crew preparing the rubber band that would power the propeller plane that would take us to Newport News.

At least I'm here. And I'm blogging. While watching sports on cable television. So it's not all that bad.