Earlier this morning (and, by "earlier", I mean "much earlier than I would have liked") I had trouble sleeping. (It seems there’s a lot of that going around lately.) Because of the way my mind works (and, by "works" I mean … well, I don’t really know what I mean) trying to get (back) to sleep is usually an uphill battle between a body that wants to crash and a brain that wants to go sprinting off in every direction at once like a dog chasing a swarm of bees. This isn’t always a bad thing, as I get a lot of ideas this way.  Unfortunately, this is also when I tend to do my best worrying, with visions of unemployment and dead franchises dancing in my head.

So, I have a number of revolving strategies that, if they don’t actually keep my mind in check, at least restrain it from getting too wildly unchecked. These usually involve math problems of some kind, my current favorite being stepping through the Fibonacci sequence in my head, which works fairly well: there seems to be about a one in three chance that I’ll start dozing by 4181 or so. This morning, though, it was more like 0,1,1,2,3, how am I going to pay the mortgage in March, 5,8, what was the number of that truck driving school, 13, 21, do places actually buy blood, 21, no, wait I did that one, blast, 0,1,1, etc.

Clearly, it was time for plan B: external distraction. Television wasn’t an option – my eyes were too tired, and there’s only so many times I can stand hearing people say "Sham-wow!" before I run the risk of believing it. So I grabbed my AT&T Fuze / HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile Phone (I hear WinMo is hiring!), fired up the RSS reader and decided to listen to a podcast – in this case, it was today’s Aero-Cast special feature from Aero-News. 

And what I heard was … me.

In the wake of all of the things that have been euphemistically going on lately, they decided to air an interview that my colleagues Brett Schnepf and Mike Singer and I did with ANN back in ‘Ought Six. So, instead of an interesting story that would distract the front of my mind (while the back of it snuck up from behind, threw a bag over its head, and smacked it until they both dozed off), I listened to myself. (And the other guys, of course, but that wasn’t nearly as weird …)

It is perhaps needless to say that I didn’t go back to sleep,  but maybe you will. Click the banner image just south of here if you’d like to give it a listen, and enjoy the sounds of three of us waxing optimistic back in what we had no idea were the good old days: