Dear Blog Reader:
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am doing fine. The
world is rushing pell mell through the most wonderful time of the year. The
lovely Miss Beverly and I got into our one horse open sleigh and traveled to
friends and family last weekend, on Christmas we loaded the visiting brood and
went to grandma’s house. We noticed that
many of you did also. Traveling down the highways and byways, we noticed many
of you were double parked in the barn lots and driveways of your families. That
time honored practice of extended family Christmas. The last week celebrators
were the lucky ones. I always loved the Sunday before extended family
Christmas. It meant that there would be present opening before the 25th.
To not have to wait until Christmas, always felt like a little bit of cheating.
Alas, it did not happen very often with the Sharritts. It appears that my
ancestors were big rule followers. There were almost never any circumstances
that would allow the premature opening of Christmas presents. In fact one year
we had to wait until after the new year to celebrate and open the presents that
technically should have been opened at least a week earlier. Oh the humanity.
I must say that I have a confession to make. All is not well
in the paradise of Sharritt marital bliss. That’s correct. There are times when
the lovely Miss Beverly is wrong. There is a bit of controversy here. I am
afraid that the lovely Miss Beverly has fallen into the grasp of the big MATTRESS
hoax. Millions of dollars have been spent by this power hungry lobby to
convince us that our mattresses are trying to kill us. They are trying to convince
us that our dead skin cells are sloughing off and falling into gravitational
forces of our mattress. As the mattress grows and grows ever denser, it is a
wonder that our floors can support these deadly bricks of dead human skin
cells. Consequently, after eight years
it is out with the old and in with the new.
I don’t see why the public should be forced to endure this
hoax when big MATTRESS refused to employ the basic manufacturing principle of
planned obsolescence. Light bulbs could last a thousand years, but by utilizing
planned obsolescence the light bulb manufacturers sell us a new one every 12
months or so. Cars don’t have to wear out every six years. I have never seen a
WWII tank sitting in an outdoor museum all rusted out. No 4 inches of hardened steel
would solve our car replacement problems. However, big AUTO and big CAR LOAN
colluded and decided that they would make cars that would last about six years.
Just in time to pay off the old car loan, save a small down payment and
indenture you once again to the finance company.
Big MATTRESS did not learn this lesson. They kept making mattresses
better and better; using space age materials, and stainless steel coils. Then
one day they realized that no one was replacing their mattresses. There was no
need. My 20 year old mattress is nearly as firm today as it was the day that we
bought it. In the bad old days before quality mattress production processes.
The mattress would break down in the middle under the bulkier parts of our
bodies. By the end of our long winter’s nap we would have completed what was
warmly referred to as a Hoosier Yoga party. By laying on our sides, we would
complete the supine crescent pose (remember to roll over and stretch the other
way). Lay on your back and you would be doing the inverted downward dog. Roll
over and finish with the cobra. For those married couples, after a few years of
marital bliss they would find themselves doing the sinking to the middle stay
on your side pose unable to keep from rolling down the steeply sloped mattress
sides into the middle of the bed.
In the morning, after you managed to finally straighten up,
you would find that you had completed a rigorous yoga work out for free. Now
with these new and improved mattress making processes, we find that our range
of motion continues to diminish over time as we lie fully supported on our ever
firm mattresses. To compensate, we buy gym memberships every January, go to two
yoga classes, get discouraged and revert back to our inflexible life styles for
the remain 51 weeks of the year.
So as big MATTRESS made better and better products, we stopped
buying new mattresses every 8 years. Something had to be done. The American
mattress industry was about to implode. Desperate times call for desperate
measures. So big MATTRESS and big YOGA got together and invented the eight year
guideline. Of course it is bogus.
Think about the science. Go ahead and remove the peel off
that banana in the kitchen; throw it out on the side walk in the middle of
summer and look to see if you can find it in a couple of days. Like all organic
matter, the banana peel and your skin cells break down. They go poof and become
a shell of their former selves. Besides most of them do not slough off in bed. Most
of them let go of their tenuous hold on your sorry carcass in the shower. You
get all suds up and they slip off into the water park ride of your plumbing. I
suppose the next big exfoliator would be your cloths. That sweatshirt and jeans
probably coax several more millions of cells every day from your furry hide, leaving
very few to get out of Dodge in your bed. Even at that, they have to get
through the pajamas and sheets before sinking into the mattress to molder into
compost.
I hear you saying “but Roger, logic is no proof. Of course
we need to replace our mattresses every eight years. Why would they threaten us
with penalty of law for removing the tags that have the manufacturing date
printed plainly upon it?” Why indeed? Why would big MATTRESS convince big
GOVERNMENT to make it illegal to remove a tag from our mattresses when what
goes on in the bedroom is no one’s business? If logic does not convince you,
let’s try experience. If billions of skin cell were sloughing off in your bed
nightly and making compost, wouldn’t families who routinely ate poppy seed
covered bagels in bed and had bed wetting children visit them in the night wake
up in poppy fields some morning? It does not happen, not even on Facebook or YouTube.
So unless you are one of those people who never showers and
sleeps on the mattress without a stitch of clothing on, you have nothing to
worry about. If you are one of those people, the age of your mattress is the
least of your quality of life issues.
I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t you just whining and
complaining too much? Stop the drama Roger. Go out and buy a new mattress? What
are you afraid of? I’ll tell you what I am afraid. The lovely Miss Beverly has
her heart set on a memory foam mattress and it frightens me. You know Memory
Foam is that space age material that lets you sink down into it; compressing
the little air space between its polymer fibers. The compressions leaves your
entire body fully supported. It is kinda like Hans Solo in horizontal carbonite.
The “great” thing is that memory foam remembers and retains your shape should
you have to get up in the middle of the night for relief. If you don’t know
what I’m talking about don’t worry you’ll be fifty soon enough. This allows you
to come back to bed and fall back to sleep in the same warm and comfy position
you left a few minutes earlier. How sweet is that?
It’s terrifying. What happens if you choose wrong on the
first night and sleep in the wrong position? What happens if you read too long
in bed and the foam mistakenly remembers that you sleep on your back? Am I to
torture the lovely Miss Beverly with my snoring til death do us part? That’s
what I do when I sleep on my back. Sometimes I like to sleep on my right side;
sometimes on my left. Am I never allowed to change my mind in my memory foam
mold? I am not a camera tucked in to a foam filled briefcase with snug
compartments cut out for my ears, nose, or chin. Memory foam scares me.
Don’t worry. It will work itself out. I will overcome my
fears. The lovely Miss Beverly and I will work out our differences and reach a
compromise. I will stop losing sleep and settle down for our long winter’s nap.
Take care.
Roger
No comments:
Post a Comment