Sleepless in New Jersey

I tossed and turned last Sunday night, which for me is very unusual. I tend to sleep like a corpse.
There were a few factors in this. For one, the excitement of moving consumed my thoughts, however my mind stubbornly resisting my efforts to sleep, as I tried to shove my legs into a comfortable position adjust my pillows and relax. For another, I was suffering from an awful Subway experience..... how they can legally provide such sub-par dining and food is beyond comprehension.. My stomach was a mess.
But I think the biggest factor was the truly strange TV program I viewed earlier Sunday night. It’s called “Dexter.”
I’ve heard little about this show, which apparently has been on the premium cable Showtime for a couple of years. Star Michael C. Hall, so good in the HBO series “Six Feet Under,” plays a serial killer who works as a police blood splatter specialist. "Best thing on TV", some critics were saying, but I didn’t get Showtime, so the claims were up for interpretation.
Certainly not the kind of show that ordinarily makes its way onto network TV, land of brainless game shows, Pussycat Doll tryouts, Skinny and crunchy Flava Flav, and the infamous "celebrity rehab". Best wishes to my pal Daniel Baldwin. But the writer’s strike has made the networks desperate for programming, and suddenly, here was the first season of “Dexter” on CBS, of all places.
I decided to watch some of it, of course, and it was entertaining. Hall walks around with a sociopathic grin, marveling at the depravities of some guy who drains the blood from his victims and carves them up with surgical precision. We know, because we see the carved bodies, right there, reassembled like Tyrannosaurus bones.
Emotionally detached, Dexter goes through the motions of a strange dating relationship with a damaged woman, content as long as she doesn’t need anything more than his occasional physical presence. When she forces herself into a clumsy attempted seduction to seal the deal, he’s petrified. This is the last thing he wants.
I actually watch the hero of the show immobilizing, murdering and dismembering his victims! Granted, they’re killers themselves — his late foster father, aware of the boy’s … proclivities after discovering the bones of neighborhood pets, found a way to channel his impulses in this direction — but it’s still pretty astounding. I remember when CBS was the network that hung on forever with shows like “Matlock" and "Everybody loves Raymond" content with a geriatric audience. Andy Griffith never dismembered anybody.
Anyway, it was entertaining, and I'd recommend this show to most people if they are to catch it on a whim as i did. But the juxtaposition of CBS and “Dexter” must have tripped a mental wire, because I was plagued with weird fever dreams, and a cold, glazing sweat. I felt like I slept about two hours.