One shouldn’t really need a mountain sherpa and a week’s worth of rations when they’re ready to go to bed, but sitting here atop my pillow-topped perch looking down over the bustling world below me, I can’t help but think that it was my undying dedication to a good night’s sleep that made the entire journey worthwhile.

I also can’t help but think that there’s a good chance I might roll out of my bed and plummet to a horrifying demise during my sleep because I definitely neglected to bring my safety harness when I set off on this grand bedroom adventure some time ago…

Earlier this week I found myself doing one of the most grown-up things a guy can do aside from purchasing life insurance and getting your will in order – I bought some new furniture, specifically for my bedroom, because that’s what older people do instead of spending their money on cool things like jet skis and video game systems. Nothing says, “My life is full of youthful excitement…” like a man holding a receipt for a 7-piece bedroom set in dazzling off-white with brushed nickel hardware and one drawer that doesn’t open quite right, but I’m probably not going to complain just because it would be too much of a hassle to have them come back.

It’s even got one of those little benches at the end of the bed to sit on because, well, old people tire easily and need someplace to rest for a bit when we get too excited about things like our new matching bedroom furniture. 

The real excitement, mind you, came from the unexpected discovery that apparently our old bedroom furniture featured a bed that was … how do I put this gently? … height-wise comparable to a little person, though 100% more comfortable with me sleeping on it for roughly eight hours every evening! My new bed, on the other hand, is roughly 47,000-feet tall, to my best approximation, to the point where I can sit on the edge and my feet can’t touch the floor – a feat I happily haven’t experienced since I was SEVEN YEARS OLD!!!

As I eluded to earlier, I’m a fully grown man … arguably a little too fully grown, if you were to consult a scale or my doctor, but either way at this point in my life I like to think that I’m pretty well equipped to handle just about any task that the world happens to throw at me. And yet figuring out how I’m going to climb into bed at night surprisingly isn’t one of those tasks which I was expecting. I suppose I could do like my dog does and just sort of fling my entire body into the air and hope for the best – traditionally that technique has worked ok for her most of the time, but falling short of the bed is something that drunk people do.

And children.

But not adults like me who don’t get to wear footie pajamas or stay up playing Halo until three o’clock on the morning because their only obligation for the entire day is a practice exam at 2:30pm and hacky sack in the quad afterwards. No self-respecting man wants to need a good boost when he’s ready to retire for the evening, or a step ladder, or one of those mechanized chair thingys that old people use to transport themselves up stairs, but in this case it’s just me trying to get into bed like a schlub!

There’s no reason for modern bedroom furniture to be this tall. I go to the barber once a month just like I’m supposed to, so there’s no justification for my head being that close to the ceiling fan when I get up every morning. The sun doesn’t come up any sooner way up here than it does back down on Earth, and aside from adding a very real thrill of falling to my otherwise mundane, plummeting nightmares, the extra elevation certainly isn’t going to help me sleep any better than when I slept safely down on the ground as god intended.

I guess that’s how they get you, though – these sneaky furniture salesmen and their tilt-wearing sales tactics … what’s a six-foot, 30-something to do but strap on his snowshoes and dig out his trusty hiking stick, and pull down those goofy goggles that mountain climbers wear to keep from being blinded by the glare of the sun across the expansive wasteland of vertical ice and snow that surrounds them.

No one should need to keep a helicopter airlift on standby for his inevitable evacuation from attempting to scale his own bed, but this is the world we live in today, and today our beds are very, very tall.