AKA A Pretty Funny Book Buying Story

 

I've dealt with insomnia since I was a teenager. It has gotten a lot better in recent months (I think partly due to being on a more regular working schedule), but I still have an Ambien prescription and I take it maybe once or twice a week when I'm having a hard time falling asleep. I'm sure you guys have heard stories of the crazy things people did after taking Ambien; people seem to do things a blacked-out drunk person would do. I've never had a super crazy Ambien experience, but sometimes it does make me a little loopy. The worst I've done is sent SnapChats to people of things around my room, saying said things were talking to me.

 

Anyway, the other night I popped an Ambien and was playing around on my tablet in bed. I fall asleep, get up, go to work, blah blah blah. I check my Yahoo! e-mail every morning at work to clear out junk and check for coupons. I noticed I had a bunch of Kindle receipts from e-books. "Huh? I didn't buy any books recently," I thought. I start clicking through them, and a hazy memory starts coming to me. You know when you get super hammered and the next day you start recalling snippets from the night before, usually thinking, "Oh shit, why did I do that?" Yeah, it was like that. Turns out, I bought a crap-ton of short horror stories and short horror story anthologies. I don't even know why; I very rarely read short stories. Luckily, most of them were either free or under $2, so at least I didn't do my bank account in. I thought it was kind of funny that I did a blacked-out book haul of sorts. (I have since started reading one of them, "Dark Carnival: An Anthology of Horror" edited by Jolene Haley. It's  slightly terrible, but I'll probably do a full review when I finish.)

 

So fast forward to yesterday, a few days after I see the Kindle books I bought. I logged on to my gmail account shortly before leaving work to find the link for the Time and Expense website we use so I can submit my hours for the week for approval. I don't use gmail much, so I went through to clear out some spam that had built up. I see several "Thank you for your purchase!" receipts from Google Play Books. "What, what? I haven't bought any books from Google in a while," I think to myself. As I open them up, I realize these purchases were made the same night as the Kindle purchases (I have a tablet so I use both Google Play and the Kindle app for reading). While I vaguely remember browsing the Kindle store, I don't remember checking the Google Play store AT ALL. Again, at least I was a smart intoxicated shopper -- all the books were $1.99. I bought some pretty random stuff, like "The Host" by Stephanie Myers and "The Calling," which is about a serial killer who kills terminally ill people and drains their bodies of blood for some reason and chops up their faces or something. I busted out laughing at my desk. Wtf kind of weird ass mood was I in buying this random shit?! I got home and told my grandma, who thought it was so funny that she literally cried laughing so hard. 

 

Lesson learned: Must turn off all electronic devices after taking Ambien. 

Although, who doesn't like a surprise book haul? ;)