I don't post here much, but I really feel like talking about this.
I could not get to sleep last night. This wasn't ordinary insomnia; by about 3 AM I felt so antsy that if I didn't go out and do something, I was going to jump out of my skin. I couldn't think coherently and I was about to tear my hair out with frustration that I couldn't sleep (I wonder if I may have had some kind of manic episode, it was quite scary). Anyway, I decided, at 3:00 in the morning, to go for a ride on my bike. Now, at this point I'm obviously not in the best mental condition, so this was in retrospect not a good idea. My original intent was to just ride around campus and blow off some steam, but somehow I decided that I was going to ride about 1.5 miles to Wal-Mart and pick up some batteries for the headlight I'd bought for my bike that day. This meant riding on the highway, at 3:00AM, without a headlight, while sleep-deprived and unable to think, much less concentrate on what I was doing. I had also not given much forethought to getting back. I go to school in Boone, NC, which is in the mountains, so there is a fair amount of hills around here. Now, going from my dorm to Wal-Mart is mostly downhill. It didn't really register with me until too late that that meant that getting back was going to be mostly uphill. I got out there and found out that Wal-Mart closed at 11pm, so I had to turn around and come back. I stopped at a 24-hour Qwik-E-Mart sort of thing to get the batteries, but had to pay out the nose for them (the advantages of being the only d*mn place in town open). I eventually made it back at about 4 AM. I think I was d*mn lucky that there were only about 3 people on the road at that hour.
I learned some interesting things though. Boone really is a small town, there is no traffic on the roads at 3:00 in the morning, the Qwik-E-Mart really is the only place open that early, and even in June it's still darned nippy at 3:00 in the morning in the mountains. I should have worn a jacket.
I'm feeling a lot better now that the daystar's out and driving the crazies away, but I'm wondering if anyone else has done stupid stuff like that because they felt like they'd go nuts if they didnt? |
