Snoring keeps man awake fifteen years

by Ripple Van Winkle. Night Desk

(Moline) When a man’s snoring keeps a herd of elk from a night’s sleep them’s some serious logs sawing.

Melvin Toole has not had a restful night’s sleep since 1998. That’s when he embraced the art of snoring. As he developed the oral/nasal exercise to precision rhythm and maximum audio application, he even kept himself up.

Snoring, in scientific terms, is defined as “snorting noises caused by vibrations of the soft palate. It is preceded in Webster’s by the word snooze and followed up by the word snorkel, for possible alliterative purposes. Or possibly some wordsmith conspiracy intent on leaving most of us in the dictionary dust.

Back to Toole: “I noticed than when I drank more than a quart of whiskey the snoring got louder and louder and the cadence grew less predictable,” said an exhausted Toole from his cave-like dwelling on the clay banks of the Mississippi River. “But rather than stop drinking I examined surgical options.”

Toole told The Horseshoe that he then traveled the globe in search of s surgeon that could help. Finally he found a clinic in Salvador, Brasil that claimed to have had a lot of success improving the lot of the chronic snorer.

“The doctors assured me that if they failed to cure my steadfast malady they could at least transform the sounds into a nice samba beat,” he winced. “I could not speak much Portuguese and even less Brasiliero and so the operation yielded very little.”

Toole’s friends and family have taken to sleeping in the other room or on the hammock outside if weather permits. Some distant relatives have all but abandoned Toole to the horrors of earplugs while others have taken to catching catnaps in Wyoming when they can. All agree that Toole has adapted well despite the fact that, like Einstein, he only sleeps three and a half  hours per night.

Problems adhering to local ordinances have burdened Toole with thousands of dollars in fines. Fortunately he is worth an estimated $2.6 billion and considers paying fines to be part of his role as a sturdy philanthropist.

In 2008 he was blamed for keeping up an entire elk herd on Simms Mesa. At one dark point in the summer of 2010 even the dog and cat ran away from home and the crickets moved out,” said a yawning Toole over a monogrammed goblet of warm goat’s milk.