Jason Hucks, one of the TENS of Neopoleon.com readers, sent me a link this morning to an article about people who are eating while they should be sleeping, thanks to a drug called Ambien.

Simply based on the numbers, I can assume that most of you weren’t reading my blog back in May of 2003, which means you probably missed my Ambien review. It’s perfectly clear from what I had to say about it that people around the world were eventually going to start eating their socks after taking the stuff. It’s more psychedelic than dropping acid and going to a Ken Kesey solstice party where they’re playing Soylent Green on a wall while you spend most of the night thinking you’re a shower (this is actually partially true – I did go to a solstice party of his almost ten years ago, but I won’t reveal the rest of the details here since, as I stated earlier this week, I’m still 80% in love with my job (also, the party was really stupid, so there’s not much of a story – it was mainly grumpy stoners fighting over the last Ding-Dong)).

Ambien, for whatever it’s supposed to do, is a hell of a drug. It seems that most people react to it pretty well, but those of us who didn’t, really didn’t.

I’m guessing that the majority of the people who are driving while “asleep” and eating while “asleep” because of Ambien are people who probably just didn’t go to sleep in the first place, and who are probably happy to have a really good excuse to explain why their dogs are just about to give birth to litters of half-human puppies. It’s like my, now deceased, great-great-uncle who, “because of the drink,” used to put his cigar out in the avocado dip whenever avocado dip was available. You can blame booze, but this was a guy who would have put his cigar out in the avocado dip if the avocado dip had been sitting on an altar in a Catholic church during Sunday service (which, now that I think about it, doesn’t necessarily rule out alcohol, but let’s assume sobriety).

Most people just take Ambien and then go to bed. It’s the vocal minority that’s chest-beating about how they’ve woken up full, with blood around their mouths, and missing a hand.

What’s doubly annoying is that corrupt whitecoats are jumping on board now to back up these few bitchers and moaners.

Like in this great quote from the article that Jason sent me:

We've had people eat very inappropriate things that they would never eat while awake. Some example [sic] would be buttered cigarettes, salt sandwiches, raw bacon.

Firstishly, I’d like to know who made these “scientists” and “doctors” the dictators of consumption morality. The sheer hubris of the word “inappropriate” in this context just makes me SICK.

Secondishly, learned-people of the medical professions, here’s a kick-butt list of arguments delivered directly to you on a solid, 100% rock and roll plated platter of whoop ass:

1. What would you put on cigarettes if you were going to eat them? Yeah. Butter. That’s what I thought.

2. A salt sandwich is much better than, say, a bleach sandwich.

3. My father, who is an upstanding, and often upright, member of the human collective, used to come home from drinking jags and eat raw bacon by the pound, and then he’d wash it down with a can of wet cat food. What the hell is wrong with raw bacon? I mean besides trichinellosis.

Also, who’s to say that these people would never eat these things “while awake”? Were there studies performed? Have we actually monitored the nourishment-consumpting behaviors of people before and after Ambien? Do we know they didn’t already used to soak their jelly-donuts in turpentine?

The answer to these questions is NO, NO, NO, and PROBABLY NOT.

I dig this quote, too:

“I put on over 100 pounds since I've been on Ambien," says Brenda Pobre, who couldn't figure out why she was gaining so much weight.

“I would wake up in the morning and there would be candy wrappers all around the bed," she says. "There would be crumbs in the bed. There would be all kinds of evidence that someone had been eating in the bed. But I had absolutely no recollection of it."

Hey, Brenda – maybe if you stopped sleeping with A BARREL FULL OF CANDY NEXT TO YOUR BED, you’d stop having these problems. I’ve certainly managed to narrowly avoid this disaster in my own life simply by not having DUMP TRUCKS UNLOAD THOUSANDS OF POUNDS OF CANDY DIRECTLY INTO MY HUNGRY FACIAL ORIFICE.

Ohhhh… Ohhhh… I was sleepy. That’s why, when I was wide awake, I went to the store and TOOK OUT A LOAN FROM THE CANDY BANK TO BUY ALL THE CANDY IN THE UNIVERSE SO THAT I COULD ACCIDENTALLY STICK IT NEXT TO MY BED.

Yeah.

I don’t think so, Brenda. My prescription for you is to take a ride on the RESPONSIBILITY TRAIN.

Chugga-chugga.

Choo-choo.

Finally:

Pobre adds, "There would be a big mess in the kitchen. There would be wrappers on the floor, popsicle sticks on the floor. I would accuse my sons of making the mess and they would say they didn't, and they would say they had seen me doing it and, of course, I thought they were lying."

Sweet.

Hey, Brenda – this dysfunctional mess isn’t by any chance your family, is it?