There is no more powerful force in the universe than the one that keeps me in
bed on a dark, chilly fall morning. I include in this statement any new forces
yet to be identified by that new high-energy particle accelerator in
Switzerland.
The bed-force is at its strongest when the dark and chill are accompanied by the
sound of falling rain.
Because I hate getting up in the dark. Allow me to elaborate. (Wait a minute
while I get my thesaurus here.) I loathe getting up in the dark. I despise
getting up in the dark.
Seriously, we need to do something about this crisis of the dwindling daylight.
There is less light now than even a couple of weeks ago. I don’t want to panic anybody, but it seems as though the sun is going away.
I know, I know. The end of Daylight Saving Time has realigned the day so that
sunrise is earlier—but I’m telling you, I think the whole thing is a scam. It seems to me as though for
every minute of daylight we gain at the beginning of the day, we lose a minute
in the afternoon.
Moving an hour of our diminishing daylight around isn’t the solution, unless what you want to do is create instant mini-jet lag for
the entire population.
No, what we need is a bold solution that involves putting a giant mirror into
orbit. From its perch high above Nashville, this mirror can catch the rays of
the sun while it is still far below the horizon and reflect that glorious
sunlight right outside my house so that I might possibly have a prayer of
getting up in the morning.
For a couple of months in high summer, I can at least sort of see what a morning
person feels like. When I wake up then, sunlight is peeking around the blinds,
birds are singing, and, even though it is early morning, the world feels like a
place where I want to be.
But when the floor is chilly, the room is dark and the clock insists, in the
face of all evidence, that it’s time to get up, the only part of the world I want to be in is my bed.
Sharon, of course, is the opposite. She wakes up early, with a sharp mind and a
cheerful attitude. This produces a great deal of jealousy on my part. What
would it be like to actually be fully awake before 7 a.m.? What would it be
like, for that matter, to be fully awake before 11 a.m.?
Maybe you’re thinking that since I’m not a morning person, then it must mean that I’m a night person. That was certainly once true. For a couple of summers in
college, I sometimes worked the night shift at a campus computing center,
meaning I got off work at midnight. I loved it. The commute home was easy,
since the streets were deserted. The all night deejay on the local rock station
played nonstop music with no commercials, and it was a cool feeling moving
through the city at a time when the rest of the world seemed to be asleep. I
thought that those work hours would be just about perfect.
The problem is, as I’ve gotten older, I’m no longer much of a night person, either. If I start out after dinner watching
some TV show in which some intrepid detectives are looking for a killer, it’s a disturbingly common phenomenon for me to doze off and never learn who the
killer is. Was it the estranged parent, the jilted girlfriend, the mysterious
stranger who happened to be walking his dog at the murder scene? Beats me, and
since I’m not exactly proud of nodding off during the show, drooling on my shirt, and
almost falling into the floor, I’m too proud to ask Sharon about the killer’s identity. So unless I happen to see a rerun, I’ll never know.
This never used to happen when I was watching The Mod Squad
while avoiding finishing my algebra homework.
So, through all these months of fall and winter, as the days are short and light
is scarce, I’m in hibernating bear mode: groggy in the morning and drowsy at night.
I guess I could move to somewhere with more conducive light, the way people used
to move to Arizona for sinus problems, but I’m not sure where that would be.
It may have been during some early morning half asleep/half awake times when I
recalled—maybe from a college astronomy course—that everywhere on earth gets the same amount of daylight a year—the light is just spread around differently.
So if I move to one of the poles, the distribution is six months light, six
months dark. Great. I’d NEVER get up for half the year. At the equator, all days are pretty much the
same length all year around. What? No long summer days? Just an unchanging 12
hours of daylight year-in, year-out? That would be a loss.
There appears to be no good solution on earth, unless you count that big mirror
orbiting above my house.
I’m sleepy.
“A collection of Watching the Wheels columns, titled “Watching the Wheels: Cheap Irony, Righteous Indignation, and Semi-Enlightened
Opinion” is available from Amazon.”
