(Un)Naturally Wired

Last Wednesday, I decided to try out those Five Hour Energy things you see at the gas station in shotglass-sized sealed plastic bottles and come with, like, 8333% of your daily recommended allowance of Vitamin B-whatever. Greg has been using a similar brand off and on at work since giving up on pop, and he reported that they worked pretty well.

For those of you who have never tried one of these, it was like doing a shot of overripe, squished berry juice (there is also a Lemon/Lime brand which simply tastes awful). The concoction took about a half hour to really get working, but when it did I felt very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed indeed. Alert. Flushed. Smiley. Bouncing on the balls of my feet. "Yeah! Let's go!" That kind of thing. And, true to the label, there was no discernible "crash" at the end, just a kind of realization about six hours later that I no longer felt that spring in my step.

I tried another of these bottles on Thursday and then on Friday, and something kind of odd happened: the "rush" or feeling of excessive vitality did not recur either time, but suddenly my ability to fall asleep in a period of less than 2-3 hours was severely compromised. I think I went to bed at 2 AM on Friday morning and didn't really go beyond stage 1 until sometime after 5. Not good.

Friday night was the worst: no sleep at all, and Saturday is an 11.5 hour shift. Ugh. I went to bed at 1, closed my eyes, and basically listened to the Sarah's bedside fan whir and thrum all night until my alarm went off at 9 AM while I tossed and turned and cursed my own existence. Once "awake," I stumbled into the shower, feeling like a walking corpse, and swore off these stupid energy things ... after I had one more on Saturday to make sure I didn't keel over behind the counter at 5 PM.

The timing of this episode was actually kind of funny: a week ago, a couple of old Record Den employees had stopped in and we recounted some good old times. In the midst of this chat, we had a discussion of being able to pull all-nighters with little ill effect in our early-mid twenties and how we could never do one of those again these days! Ha ha! No way, Jose! Amusing.

Anyway, I managed to keep myself pretty busy on Saturday (spent the entire evening alphabetizing 1000 pieces of Sony/EMI product), and despite getting a bit headachey as evening fell, I managed to make it through the day. Once I fell asleep Saturday night (which did take a while), I was completely out the whole rest of the night. Mmmmm REM sleep. So relaxing.

So, yes, these things seem to work pretty well, but caveat emptor ... especially if you are an old and decrepit hippie like me.