I guess my parents didn’t like me that much, because when I was only 8 years old, they sent me off to this pre-military school called the Scouting program. Every single week we had to attend these meeting where they would stick us in these tan prison uniforms and make us learn all these useful skills, like whittling and first aid. We had to earn badges to climb the ranks by learning the least relevant information about things we didn’t care about. Things like being a good citizen of the community, nation, and world. Every week we had to pledge our fealty to the Scouts like we were members of the High Table, ala John Wick, by repeating these propagandic pledges like the Scout Oath, Scout Law and the Scout Motto.

I was only able to escape the cult when I earned my Eagle Scout badge right before I turned 18. It was only after “I will serve. I will be of service” and did a “service project” for the community and passed an interview with a panel of former Eagle Scout cult members that I got out.

I still have PTSD (Post Traumatic Scouts Disorder) about the absolute worst part of scouts. The campouts. I’m still tortured by the awful April 1987, where I was forced to go to not one, not two, not three, but four campouts four weekends in a row. One thing you should know about where I spend the entirety of my time in the Scouting program. It was South Dakota. If you’ve ever been to South Dakota, you know that April is the time of year when it’s either snowing outside, or it’s in full recovery mode from their brutal winters, in which 1000’s of inches of snow has fallen and the wilderness is a miserable, cold, muddy, mess of trees, mud, and dead branches.

On one of those weekends, it was cold, but sunny when we pitched our tents, but at right around the time we were getting ready to go to sleep, we heard a little bit of thunder, saw a little lightening, and then the heavens started crying like we’d never seen. Luckily, we had our “waterproof” tarp over our tent, so we would sleep miserably but dry.

Except that the waterproof tarp manufacturers promised meant water porous, because we spent the night sleeping on the shore of the newest nature-made lake that had been created in the middle of our tent during the second longest night of my life.

So you know the question that Mattress Firm asks in their commercials, “How do you sleep at night?” my answer that night would have been, “I didn’t.”

Earlier in the blog post when I said I escaped the cult of Scouts the day before I turned 18, wasn’t exactly true. When I was in that final interview, one of those interviewers mentioned something that there is a curse associated with the Eagle Scout. They said, when you get your Eagle, you are “marked for life”. What I found out was that it didn’t mean that people would respect you, but that you would be asked to be a Scout leader. Until about 4 years ago, when our church quit the Scout program altogether, I was still “marked” as a Scout leader.

On one such occasion of being a leader, we were tasked with a winter trip. Some genius thought it would be a good idea to do a winter camp, and build snow caves to sleep in. They considered it a survival skill. I considered it another form of torture. Because I had to work, I arrived late, so the boys had already built the snow cave. What they didn’t mention was that it was built for two, not five.

This was the longest night of my life. I spent 8 hours inside a cave made of snow, ice, and four scouts that only had the space for two people. The hard ground wasn’t the worst part. The sheer cold wasn’t the worst part. The hard ice wall that my face was up against wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was an old, bitter, claustrophobic Bitter Ben was crammed between the hard ice wall and one of the scouts and the exit was nowhere near me. I could have spent all night using a blow torch to try to fight my way out; that ice wall wasn’t moving, and neither was the scout next to me. I spent the next few weeks recovering from that physically and I’m still recovering mentally from it.

I was in a living nightmare. I was cold, tired, and crammed in a small space for 8 hours. If Mattress Firm asked me, “How do you sleep at night?” I would have said. “I didn’t.”

In November 2003, my wife and I went to Disneyland. I hate Disneyland, but we were in California, so at least the weather was nice. We found out my wife was pregnant with my first daughter, so that was pretty exciting, I guess. I didn’t know it that day, but 9 months from then would be the last day I would ever answer the question, “How do you sleep at night?” with “Pretty good”. Once my daughter was born, I immediately stopped sleeping regularly. The best part was that three years later when my daughter finally started sleeping well, she handed my son the baton in the “waking me up in the middle of the night right when I was entering REM sleep, relay race”.

It was then that I realized that sleep was a lost cause and I started staying up late, and waking up early and just accepting that I would never be able to sleep again, except when I came home, laid on the couch and passed out for 10-15 minutes. I just accepted that I was the poor man’s version of Nikola Tesla, Einstein and Thomas Edison. I haven’t exactly invented the lightbulb, the theory of relativity or the Tesla like these people did, but I do run a pretty successful blog, so…

You all might be lucky enough to say that you got a good night’s sleep last night, because you have a Mattress Firm, but I didn’t. Sleep and I were never destined to be good friends, because like the other geniuses that never slept, I’m too busy to sleep when I have another video game to play at midnight.

I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I can’t remember if I told you at the beginning that there would be Bitter Friday Giftures, but here they are….

My parents didn’t like me very much…

The only way to escape the Scouts (or the High Table)…

Just like John Wick…

However, just like John Wick, I thought I was out at 18…

Just like John Wick, in exchange for me coming back…

Now I have PTSD (Post Traumatic Scouts Disorder)…

When I came back to the Scouts as an adult supervisor…

But this snow cave…

It didn’t help that not only do I not like other people…

Luckily, my kids never did anything to make me…

I always felt bad…

But then I realized that…

And the inventor of the Tesla…