Last night was the same as every other miserable night since a rendezvous with ZzzQuil in early April: I slept for 2.5 hours, then got up with Muriel and dozed again for about as long. Five hours of fragmented sleep kept me awake enough to join Crankenstein on a shopping excursion to replace her desk lamp, followed by lunch at her favorite Vietnamese restaurant.* Since then I’ve resisted the siren call of a nap, determined to be as sleepy as possible at bedtime.
Whether that’s a winning strategy is debatable: I’ve developed a troubling capacity to remain awake for hours at a time even when profoundly tired. But what goes up must come down, so I also startle Crankenstein — and occasionally myself — by falling asleep at the drop of a hat in other situations. It happened this weekend when we watched The Hammer (2023), a Lifetime movie that was clearly conceived as a pilot for a courtroom series that never materialized.
Reba McEntire stars as Kim Wheeler, a newly-appointed traveling judge in Nevada whose ‘Hammer’ nickname stems from a zany courtroom incident. Her predecessor’s suspicious death requires probing, of course, and she inevitably encounters sexism and corruption along the way. Wheeler, whose name is a little too on-the-nose, prefers life on the road to being stuck in one place. It’s a way to put some distance between herself and past traumas, some of which are hinted at when she returns to her childhood home and is reunited with her sister, Kris, who either manages a brothel or works as a prostitute herself; I fell asleep before figuring it out.
If you’re familiar with Reba, Happy’s Place or McEntire’s concerts, you know that Peterman is the comedic wind beneath her wings. The Hammer is a dramedy that leans toward drama; as sister acts go, its tone is quite a bit darker than Happy’s Place, their new NBC sitcom, and had a more intriguing premise. Having slept through its second half, there’s not much more I can say, so let’s segue to real-life sister acts, a topic that probably makes you want to nap. Tom and Youngest Sister, who were best friends for most of their lives, remain estranged. Youngest Sister’s recent estrangement from our parents also continues.
The rancor involving our parents troubles me even more than my sisters’ cold war, which I’ll complain about in slightly greater detail when my head doesn’t hurt from sleep deprivation. They’re all taking tomorrow for granted, something no one should do when making decisions like this, and I hope they don’t end up with lingering regrets.
That’s as much as I can muster tonight. Crankenstein’s at Maundy Thursday service as I write this and I’m going to start winding down for the evening and give some thought to a new pre-bedtime routine that might foster better sleep. My routines need to be reevaluated in general because breaking out of this slump will be very difficult without adequate rest.
* The new lamp replaces a trash-picked one from medical school that survived several assassination attempts by her cat before finally succumbing to old age.