Thoughts While Counting Ceiling Tiles

Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I counted ceiling tiles. That’s when it dawned on me that perhaps the greatest discovery of all time was when a primitive biped, beset with an infinite number of stars to count in an expansive night sky, sought shelter in a cave and found counting stalactites by a dimming fire to be more conducive to falling asleep than counting stars. That is not to belittle the primitive biped; back then numbers didn’t go as high, hardly past twenty-three, so counting to infinity was a tough ask. Counting stalactites was more attainable, and thus mankind advanced to the caveman era.

After cave dwelling for a few eons, mankind progressed to the agricultural era. It was brought about primarily by the tanned-hide ceilings of tents. With nothing better to stare at than a tanned hide, early tent dwellers realized they could count sheep in their heads in lieu of counting stalactites or stars. Thus, humans started keeping sheep in fields where they lay, staring up at the ceiling of tents while enumerating their herds.

Eventually, humans wised up and realized they could stop counting and following sheep around and instead built more permanent domiciles with walls made out of sticks and stones and baked mud and ceilings made out of asbestos, both in smooth or popcorn form (I suspect popcorn ceilings arose from a subconscious desire to return to simplicity, specifically the rough ceilings of the stalactite era, when you needn’t need a thirty-year mortgage with a 6% interest rate to live in a cave).

Since then, ceilings have come and gone. At one point, high ceilings were popular, especially in old farmhouses that depended on airflow through windows as the primary cooling strategy. Then came the era of the ranch house, with low ceilings. Now vaulted ceilings with exposed beams are quite popular, especially old rustic beams with knots, a few termite trails, and wood borer holes—I think this aesthetic has something to do with the post-modern desire to sleep aboard a pirate ship. Maybe soon, we will have barnacled ceilings, with faux barnacles to count.

Sometimes it is good to remember that, beyond aesthetic considerations, the primary purpose of a ceiling is practical—for counting things when you can’t sleep. Some people still count sheep while trying to fall asleep as a vestige of the agricultural era (and some people actually still keep sheep, which is considered a more serious mental illness), but counting things at night is innately, if not exclusively, human. It is nothing to be ashamed about. It may be the only thing that separates humans from other lifeforms. Well, that—and the ability to laugh.