My new motto: "Throw the morning people to the morning lions!" |
Recently I had what I would call a Fran Lebowitz Moment. I was minding
my own business, getting by, when it suddenly dawned on me how certain other
people are nuts.
I suddenly feel an obligation from out of nowhere to become more specific.
I will yield to this sense of obligation: morning people. Morning people
are nuts. This we knew already. But now I realize precisely how they are
nuts. Such a realization is valuable to me. Among other things, it helps
make life more interesting for me. At least, more interesting than being
dead would be.
Morning people are nuts because they have an insatiable need for useless
experiences and information. To a sane person, for example, dawn is a time
of day to sleep through. But to a morning person dawn is a time for wondrous
observations, insights, and discoveries: "Look, wow, its another sunrise!"
"Hey everybody! It's morning!" "The Earth is turning to face
the sun again!" "Look, the sky is becoming light just like
it did the last trillion times this happened!"
I didn't arrive at this realization all at once. It began one day when I
was forced to be up at the ungodly hour of 9 in the ungodly a.m. Maybe I
had to go to some stupid ungodly committee meeting that morning. So that
the morning wouldn't be a total waste, I turned on the radio and happened
to catch a local call-in show, one obviously geared to the morning people
audience, on big trees.
When I say it was obviously geared to morning people, I mean it is obvious
to me now. Now I see the signs. Suppose sane people had been the audience.
Then the program might have told us something useful concerning big trees,
such as that you can get in out of the rain by means of them. But no, this
program was not about conveying useful information. This program was about
big trees. That there ARE big trees. I mean, that some trees are little,
and that other trees are bigger. That some trees are biggest.
The show consisted of the local radio guy, I'll call him Steve, interviewing
a Big Tree Expert, I'll call him Raoul (I forgot to take down their names,
so sue me, I'm too sane). Steve would say things like, "So I guess
you've found some really big trees, haven't you, Raoul?" And then Raoul
would say things like, "Once I was in British Columbia, near Vancouver,
and I saw a really big one, Steve." And then people would call in,
I swear they were all morning people, and they would say things like, "I
saw a big tree once, you know the one I mean? It was in California."
And Raoul would answer with, "Maybe you're talking about the big one
I know of there. It's really big." And the listener would say, "Yeah,
that's the one, it was big all right. Awesome!"
Since hearing that program I have been alert to that sort of phenomena.
I have noticed that such things occur to the greatest extent in the mornings
and that morning people are usually involved. For example, it was morning
people who first announced at the end of February that it had been a year
since last year's Mardi Gras celebration. In effect, they were telling us
all that calendars could be relied upon to that degree, a fact that was
probably familiar to the ancients even prior to the invention of Tuesdays.
In the last few days since the vernal equinox, morning people have blitzed
the media with the earth-shaking news that baseball will continue this year.
That's right everybody, hop out of bed, you will want to be wide awake for
this last year's season did not end baseball! They've decided to
have another go at it! Isn't that just incredible?! And look! The days are
getting longer!
Knowing what I now know, I can identify morning people at all hours of the
day. Let's say it's 5 p.m. and the person I'm talking to suddenly gushes
all over me about the fact that it's the 21st century now. That would be
a morning person.
Knowing that could be useful. I could recommend that person to take my place
on some ungodly Real Change committee, for instance. My new motto:
"Throw the morning people to the morning lions!" (Does not necessarily
supercede pre-existing mottos.)
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