Mike Graine

He's been following me around for 12 years, but in the past year he has become really obnoxious. He usually has a Nerf bat that he uses to tap the right side of my head. It's not hard enough to knock my head around, just enough to feel it. He goes at it about 70 times a minute, 24 hours a day and rarely takes a day off. Randomly, averaging about four times a week now, he trades the Nerf bat for a rubber mallet. About half of those times he rears back and knocks my head with a solid wallop that puts me on the mat. Then he turns the volume of the world up so that every tick and tap and ding rattles my entire body while he amps up the intensity of all the lights in the universe so that the least beam sears my retinas. Then it gets messy.

That's just a funny way I thought of to describe them last night while curled in bed doped to the gills trying to sleep through one.