December 23, 1995: On a wooden basement staircase, in an empty house, with no heat, with my dog. My parents lost the house. All our stuff had been moved out. Our nervous dog wouldn’t settle. I couldn’t leave him. That was the last night I slept in the house where I grew up.
December 1998: On a basement floor near Ottawa. At least it was carpeted. Hammered after some party near a college. In the night, some angel draped a blanket over me. Best feeling of my life to that point. Some guy’s sister was kind to us.
May 2009: Coober Pedy, Australia. Slept in a hostel that was in a mine. Slept underground in a room with bunk beds and no windows. It was weird. Felt like a bomb shelter.
December 2011: Wadi Rum, Jordan. Slept outside under the stars on a sleeping mat on a rock of biblical proportion. The guy in the tent next to ours was snoring. Loudly. My partner couldn’t take it. We dragged our mattresses out onto a rock 300 m from camp. I reasoned — scorpions were less likely to find us. Coulda been wrong. Still here to tell the tale.
I’ve slept in some weird places.
When I was homeless I slept the kind of places homeless people sleep: Libraries, park benches, unused buildings, moving busses, the subway.
When I was in the Scouts I slept the kind of places adventurous campers sleep: an igloo I helped build, on top of and under picnic tables, brush lean-tos, under the stars on a mountaintop. The weirdest was probably one time the weather turned dangerous during a jamboree and we all decamped to the nearest YMCA and I slept on the hallway floor with a towel over my face because we couldn’t turn the lights off.
There was also the time I got locked out and couldn’t wake my wife up by phone or banging or yelling. It was one in the morning the coldest night of the year so I hopped the last train downtown and crashed in the break room at work on a massage chair.
On a golf course putting green.
I was drunk as a skunk.
I climbed the fence and then I took the big ball markers that mark the tee of each hole, and I stabbed the stabby part into a tree until one tree had all the markers stabbed into it.
Then I went to sleep.
Not super proud of that
On top of a torpedo in a submarine with loud af Navy Seals a few feet away.
How many hours had you been awake?
Oh, like, 12 hours. Maybe 13 or 14. Submariners live on an 18 hour day, not 24.
Pile of cardboard at work because I was pulling 90 hour weeks and I had to work in like 5 hours at the end of my previous shift and I figured the extra time spent traveling home was better spent sleeping.
Bathtub full of vinegar and water after I got a bad sunburn.
Did that help?
It helped me tolerate the “itching under my skin” sensation but I’m not sure how much of that was just from being in liquid. I don’t recall what the vinegar was supposed to do.
Long standby shift at a hotel (think Hilton style). My employer (not the hotel) had a storage room that was just an old hotel room with all the fittings taken out- No bed or couch, just storage racks. I got super bored, took a nap in the old bathtub.
The staff bathroom of an abandoned diner on top of a mountain in Japan. I was cycle touring, didn’t want to put up the tent if I could just go inside. The big windows and proximity to the road meant I didn’t want to be using a flashlight inside, so I went into the staff bathroom, no windows. Also no toilets or anything, just a bare tiled room. Weird place to sleep, but I went into the main area to make breakfast, it was an amazing view. Bonus for not getting the tent wet.
Curled up in a ball in the back of my Wrangler.
After working a 20hr shift, I got home reached in the back to get my backpack and couldn’t quite reach. Crawled out of the seat to grab it and woke up 6 hours later disoriented af.
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In a server room, multiple times, not amazing but the blinking lights are kinda fun to look at at it’s basically like a very loud white noise machine. Also it’s nice and cool.
In the classroom, on the floor, before class started, and was woken up when class was over.
What a nice teacher. :)
In the women’s locker room at the shipyard. Nobody ever goes in there, it’s clean, it’s never used, and I just got off a sixteen hour shift of welding. I was damn tired and couldn’t muster the strength to drive myself home.
I got about five hours of sleep which was enough rest to drive myself home and call out “sick” the next day.
A public toilet …it was cold outside
In a Walmart parking lot. in a van, with three homies… in a random state. Was it Georgia?
Top shelf of a walk in closet that was obscured from view from the door.
Under a futon couch.
On the roof of the house in the angled portion where 2 downward slopes come together.
In the back of a truck in the back yard.
In the middle of a grassy area behind our garage
My parents used to wake me up at 4:30 in the morning to take a cold shower and then spend the next 4 hours doing religious worship. The only time I could read “Horrible secular books” like Mutiny on the Bounty, the three musketeers, and the man in the iron mask was late at night after everyone went to bed. I would stay up till 2:30-3:00am sometimes reading and I knew waking up at 4:30 was just not gonna happen.
Yeah, I got in a bunch of trouble when I came out of my hiding spot the next morning, but sometimes it was worth it.
