Sleep N Sleep

Spent considerable time two weeks ago sleeping around. 

Get your mind out of the gutter, I was mattress shopping. 

There is something surreal about walking in a Sit N Sleep, or where ever it is you choose to buy a bed and see couple laying on all manner of bedding material. While a slick wannabe car salesman hovers over them barking RTB's and well-rehearsed talking points...

"The coils have been replaced with thermo-dynamic gel stacks that monitor your position and shift accordingly thanks to the built in Cray SuperSleeper™Super Computer."

"And with a simple lien attached to your home equity, it's surprisingly affordable."

Deb and I did the mattress dance about 15 years ago. 

It's hardly a simple endeavor. Particularly when she had her heart set on one of those newfangled Memory Foam beds. For an ungodly amount of money, I had the pleasure of sleeping on what can only be described as a hot sandy beach, often waking up in the middle of the night in a pool of my own sweat. The Memory Foam remembered to torture me every night. That is until I put my sweaty foot down and said this mattress is going back to whence it came.

But our mattress dilemma was far from over. Deb preferred a softer pillowy feel and after many years of office napping on a carpeted floor, I preferred something firm, extra, extra firm.

We compromised and bought a rock hard bed with a three inch pillow topper, which I grew to hate. 

Once, while Deb was at the supermarket, I managed, like Sysphys, to flip the 100 lbs. mattress over, to the pillowtop-less side, slip the sheets and covers back on and get about a week's worth of good sleep. Which ended promptly when Deb started complaining about lower back pain and forced a confession out of me.

We had actually talked about buying one of those fancy-schmancy split beds with adjustable firmness, temperature control, reclining headrest and raised footrests, as well as dual remote controls. And who doesn't love remote controls. 

But other things, like lingering college tuition payments, car loans and skyrocketing healthcare costs, got in the way.

Life has a way of reminding us all of its finite quality and so I decided, after the toughest, most draining stretch in my 64 years on the planet, to treat myself. 

I looked at the Sleep Number bed, the one relentlessly advertised on TV and found the salesman to be squirrely. And the bed, perhaps even squirrelier. I made my way back to the Sit N' Sleep in Culver City, and snapped up their top of the line, Split King with all the features including a wave massage that travels from my head to my toes and then back again.

I will admit it took me an hour and some Euclidean Geometry to figure out how to get the sheets on the damn thing, much to the amusement of my daughter. But now I'm set. And I love it.

I guess the couple in the picture above encountered the same difficulties and just decided to go without the sheets.

Different strokes, I guess.