R.I.P. Alaskan Dreams

Today, I bury a lifelong dream of mine. I have been forced to give up on my hope to someday be surrounded by the natural beauty of the wilderness and move to Alaska. For years, I envisioned my family and I someday escaping from the rat race and living in a log cabin where we would hunt caribou while riding on the backs of grizzly bears.

Before you label me a quitter, realize that I haven’t given up because of the reasons you may think. I can put up with cold. I have not run into sudden financial trouble. My wife hasn’t told me I’m nuts and that she would never willingly move there with me. This is mostly because I never told her of my inclination. I was planning on crossing that bridge when I came to it, either by deceiving her into traveling there with me under the guise of it being a weeklong cruise or by employing heavy anesthetics.

The true reason why I’ve resigned to live a bit further south has to do with my acceptance of my own psychological limits. I have recently come to terms with the fact that lack of sunlight absolutely blows my flipping mind.

Here we are, less than a month past the winter solstice and I am ready to tear my hair out. At seven in the evening, I’m convinced it must be midnight. I feel the constant expectation of sunrise and it never seems to come. This is most likely because it is only eight in the evening.

The month of daylight doesn’t trouble me. That part of living in Alaska would be completely acceptable. I can sleep through anything, including movies, crying children, and conversations.

When I wake up at six in the morning to head to work and the sun’s not up until well after I’m already there and then drive home in darkness, I can’t help but feel the tingling sensation in the back of my head. This tingling is the desire to want to strangle the first person that causes me any stress whatsoever. The more consecutive days I spend with this daylight schedule, the stronger this drive becomes. I fear that if I were to put up with thirty straight days of little more than a few minutes of daylight glowing over the horizon, I would surely become a serial killer, leaving the bodies of people who cut me off on the highway, told me they were no longer serving breakfast or pronounce the t in often in my wake.

So, for the good of humanity and the fine population of Alaska, I vow I shall never move there. Hopefully, everyone will sleep a little better knowing this. Although, with the lack of daylight up there right now, I’m sure they have little trouble sleeping at all this time of year.