Full of sound and fury, signifying the lack of a good night’s sleep

After 15 years of marriage, The Lovely Mrs. Taylor has suddenly noticed I snore. Or rather, she says I snore. I don’t exactly believe she’s lying, but as I’ve never heard the snoring myself, I can’t verify the veracity of her claim.

If I do snore, I’m certain it is, like me, quiet, dignified and possessed of a certain poetic, rhythmic beauty. Forget that Mrs. Taylor describes my nocturnal auditory emissions as “a rogue elephant trampling a phalanx of inebriated tuba players.”

She’s just being mean, and maybe getting back at me for the times I’ve mentioned her snoring in this column.

The difference is her snoring does not bother me. I actually find the gentle susurration of her nighttime breathing to be somewhat soothing. (And by “gentle susurration” I mean like the chainsaw solo in that Jackal song.)

Yeah, it’s loud. But like I said, it really doesn’t keep me awake. I grew up in the city, sleeping through a cacophony of ambulances, fire trucks, bar patrons stumbling home at 2 a.m. and the steady, unending red-light-green-light cadence of traffic. I actually welcome the racket.

Mrs. T, conversely, is a country mouse, the noise of which, by the way, she can hear a mile away. She can perceive the beating wings of a butterfly across an open field, the echo of the moon traversing its eternal east-west passage across the night sky.

She was raised in a silent countryside and if she could, she would sleep in a padded, soundproof vault deep within the bowels of an abandoned nuclear missile silo.

She hates noise. And the noise she hates most—more than Sam I Am hated green eggs and ham—is the noise of my snoring.

So last week Mrs. T brought home a little bottle of anti-snore spray. It’s cleverly packaged to look like a fire hydrant, to “put out” the noise of my snoring, get it?

I’m wary of taking any over-the-counter medication, especially something I don’t really, really need. But I love The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I don’t want her to start sleeping in the guest room, so I gave the stuff a try.

All it takes is a couple quick “puffs” shot into the back of the throat before turning in for the night. According to the package, the spray has about 65,000 ingredients, but it tastes pretty much like water, so what the heck.

The package also claims it’s not habit forming (which is the same thing Big Tobacco said about cigarettes until the Surgeon General made them stop lying).

At any rate, the stuff for the most part works, according to Mrs. T. What snoring I still generate is minor, compared to my former output, she says.

Now if only we could do something about the noises emanating from our weekly Chili Night, we’d be all set.


Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.