You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
12 minutes.
I over slept by 12 minutes and it set off my entire morning.
7 am became 7:12 am.
12 silly minutes.
Time dominoes began tumbling.
What’s the lead story on Good Morning America?
I don’t know. 12 minutes in and they are all ready showing me how to apply eye shadow.
12 minutes.
“Hey where ya been?” contacts text me.
12 minutes.
Life’s Crazy but it often has a rhythm.
The morning rhythm is an important rhythm.
Get up. Use the john. Brush your teeth. Look at your face in the mirror.
“How the hell did my hair do that?”
Is there a viper in my pillow?
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It is, and most of the world eats it in the morning.
You see what I’m saying.
Bacon equals morning. Coffee equals morning. Toast and jam and butter slathered over bread. MORNING MORNING MORNING.
This night shift is a grind. In at 2 pm – home by mid night.
It’s 3rd shelf tequila rough.
The shift technically ends around 10:30 pm. Allow for drive time and it’s 11 pm. Allow for some decompression time and a beer and a look at the late night comics, suddenly it’s the next day.
Where did the day go? I think to myself.
I will drive through my neighborhood on the way home and it’s asleep.
I can hear the collective snoring of people who will wake in 6 hours and bitch about having to wake in 6 hours.
The time is dark, cold, incongruous. Only burglars and trouble are out right now.
I am stone cold sober, yet I feel drunk. I am always worried that I will be stopped by the police.
“Hey what are you doing up at this time of night?” I imagine them saying, blue lights blasting through my car.
2nd shift is one shift too late in my opinion.
Last night I pulled the covers over my head at 1 am.
I have danced on bars in honky tonks and been home earlier.
This shift is a metallic frisbee to the teeth.
It throws off your equilibrium and your body clock.
2nd shift is an unbalanced see saw with only one rider.
Breakfast is now 11 am. Dinner whenever the fancy strikes.
I’ve been trying to keep normal hours in the morning to preserve my daily regimen of writing and working out and making Life’s Crazy happen.
But when you come home at 1 am, it’s hard to beat the buzzer.
So today I slept late. 12 minutes. 12 measly minutes.
My brain said go for it, but my body and heart weren’t in it.
Get up the demons of the future screamed.
Nobody created an empire in their sleep I hear the spirits cry.
The internal body clock is a weird thing.
Almost every morning, I wake up and look at the clock. It says 6:37 am.
Why?
Perhaps the solar flare of light bursting through my window, poking me in the pupils is the culprit. It powers through the room like a Hiroshima mushroom cloud.
Maybe it’s the birds fornicating outside my window. They chirp in piercing shrills of delight like winged semi trucks idling at a roadside truck stop.
Maybe it’s the onslaught of people with real lives driving to work and school. Tires on asphalt, roll by, in an endless parade of normalcy.
I pull the 2nd pillow onto my face. It blocks out the light, but it suffocates me. I trade darkness for oxygen deprivation.
I sleep with ear plugs to block out the world. The sound of my own heart is a rock show, beating inside my skull.
What I have learned? The world is meant to sleep at night. The day light is for life. People wake up and yawn and coffee percolates and bacon sizzles in the pan. Showers run and mothers shout to kids to hurry up or they’ll be late for the bus.
The night is for vampires and burglars skulking in the shadows.
So I am pushing forward, making my mornings count.
My nights are filled with spot news and live shots.
In between, there is a cushion of time, perhaps 6 hours when the rejuvenating powers of sleep must work their magic.
I know the vampire shift is only temporary.
Some people work 2nd shift for a lifetime.
I am on borrowed time.
For me, morning is the best time. For me, the morning ritual is important.
Contacts who have news live here. Ideas that fill a Crazy brain pour from the flood gates at this interval.
Vampires? Darkness? Sleep?
All temporary.
Tomorrow Hiroshima will bellow through my window and I will embrace the nuclear morning.
Tomorrow the roar of a million school kids will rise as they race to get an education ranked 20th in the industrialized world.
Bring it morning.
I’m a sleep warrior. I live in the daylight where dreams come to incubate.
Life’s Crazy