The science of sleep

When you are a man, as I often am, and when you live on a 30-foot sailboat with your wife, as I now have occasion to do, you may find that the geometry of your sleeping situation is inversely related to your notions of masculine comfort. As you’ll see from the accompanying graph, a v-shaped bed is not conducive to the practice of sleeping with your heels spaced as far apart as possible, as is my preference.

Next let’s consider geography, or the my-side/your-side divide that is a necessary element of peaceful coexistence when one of your partnership who is not writing this missive is is a soft yet brutal heater. This serves to further restrict one’s comfortable sleeping confines (I choose this word deliberately) by approximately half. I say approximately because there is a third variable in the system – topography. On Serenity, we enjoy a slight list to starboard due to the placement of our diesel oven, which is largely imperceptible until you put a pencil lengthwise on the table or occupy the starboard side of a v-shaped bed with a woman who lacks the moral fortitude to resist gravity and STAY ON HER SIDE.

All of these factors coalesce into a system that seems bent to leave a man such as myself on a 30-foot sailboat with his wife shaped into a hot tangled log rolled tightly against the one-foot lane between the hull and a hot place.

Where sleeping on the water once conjured pleasant visions of bobbing in the womb of the world to a lullaby of creaking ropes and lapping waves, it now represents yet another situation in which a man, as I sometimes am, must nobly endure. Unfortunately that’s not really my thing, so I opted for another  coping strategy, which was to ask one’s indulgent wife, as she often is, to trade sides with him. Like magic, the problem of territorial infringement disappeared overnight. How do you figure the math on that?

Now if I could find a way to spread my heels . ..