Carl Kozlowski was a writer and arts editor of Pasadena Weekly for 17 years until 2019, when the paper was sold and much of the staff was laid off. Over those years, he interviewed hundreds of stars for entertainment profiles of the hottest acts and writers passing through Pasadena.
He moved back to his hometown of North Little Rock, Ark. at the start of the pandemic in January 2020, and has continued to write about comedy for the Chicago Sun-Times and spotlight unusual businesses for a statewide magazine. But he also had one dream project he decided to work on: creating a collection of his funniest essays, articles and stories from his 25-year journalism, radio, standup comedy
and podcasting.
The result is “Dozed and Confused: Tales from a Narcoleptic, Nutty Life” – a reference to the fact Carl managed to juggle all those career interests while battling narcolepsy, the disease where you can fall asleep anytime, anywhere. The book is both funny and inspirational, as it details his wildest misadventures as he fell asleep constantly at the worst times across Los Angeles, but still always came out on top and eventually had a near-miraculous recovery.
With the book, Kindle e-book and audio all now available at Amazon (Dozed and Confused: Tales from A Nutty, Narcoleptic Life: Kozlowski, Carl: 9798360823865: Amazon.com: Books), Carl took time with his former PW deputy editor-now Pasadena Now Managing Editor André Coleman to answer some questions about this very funny book.
PNOW: Koz, you’d fall asleep anytime at the PW. But somehow you always managed to get the job done, and you were all over LA doing stuff. What are some of the craziest things you went through and how did you manage to come out on top?
CARL: I remember the time I completely fell asleep and face-planted into my keyboard, making such a racket that everyone jumped. I passed out while writing there into the evening another time and found myself jolting awake to see our publisher staring at me in the dark. I overslept on buses and trains while on the way to interviews, and one time I even passed out mid-interview with two-time Oscar winning actress Hilary Swank and she freaked out because she thought I died. But as you say, I always got the stories done.
Outside of work, I passed out in the audience of Jimmy Kimmel’s show and got ripped by him on national TV, had Mick Jagger shout at me to wake up when I won killer tickets to a Stones concert and the craziest thing was having to jump in a stranger’s car before Uber was around race up to 90 mph to catch up with an LA city bus that I’d left my laptop with the week’s worth of my work for the PW on.
I always felt God was keeping me safe, so I never got too worried and always kept a sense of humor. But maybe I was just God’s Jester, set up to make Him laugh.
Since your book is called Dozed and Confused, so did narcolepsy make you confused on a regular basis? What other symptoms did you experience?
Every time I woke up on a bus ten stops past where I meant to get off, I felt like I’d drugged, kidnapped and abandoned myself. Yes, confusion happened all the time! It affected everything, making me have to rely on public transportation, Ubers and begging for rides in the Car Capitol of the World.
Most dates went badly because I’d fall asleep while they were talking, and they thought I wasn’t interested. I did go on a date with a narcoleptic woman I met on Facebook once. We slept together on the first date – because we both fell asleep in our diner booth.
You got out of LA and now live in a pretty small city. You say you managed to cure your condition. How did that finally happen?
My condition was really called “virtually narcoleptic” by my doctors, including a sleep specialist, in LA. It actually turned out that it was a combination of horrible sleep apnea I wasn’t treating right, my diabetes causing me to have “food comas” when I ate the wrong things, and bipolar mania that drove me to stay up too late and wake up too early almost daily.
Moving out of the rat race helped me reach doctors way more easily. I diligently use a great CPAP machine, got control of my diet and diabetes and dropped my A1C to a healthy level, and was diagnosed and medicated right for my bipolar.
I figured if I could come through happily from all I endured, people might find my stories funny to read about and could find inspiration. At the very least, they can thank God that they’re not as messed up as I was!
