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.
I wanted a nap in undergrad but didn’t have a lot of time between classes so, to avoid being disturbed, I climbed up onto a lecture hall roof to sleep. It was a really nice nap
Edit: also once when I worked at taco bell I napped on the boxes of sauce packets in the back
Just the other day I took a nap in a (dry at the time) runoff ditch behind a commercial plaza, bc if I drove home to nap I would’ve had less time to sleep
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.
