Morning Ruminations

If I go to bed before midnight I wake up around five in the morning. Five in the morning is early. Too early. When my kids were growing up I needed to get to bed before midnight because I had to have my sleep to stay healthy. And I slept until seven or eight.

Then I started getting older. Started?  I'm way deep into it now. I noticed -- eventually -- that for a long time I would wake up at exactly 4:30 if I went to bed at 10:30.  In the summertime that was when the baby birds started to chirp. Like clockwork. So maybe they were waking me up. I don't know.

Unfortunately, if I got up with the baby birds, then I needed a nap at an inopportune time, usually when I was driving somewhere or stuck in a meeting later that day. 

Then I realized I could sleep later if I went to bed later. It was some kind of a math problem. So I began to stay up until midnight so I would wake up at six. At first, I was afraid I would be tired later if I did that, but I wasn't. I became my own scientific experiment. 

Of course sometimes I still fall asleep before midnight and wake up just before dawn. If it's the weekend, I've driven to the beach so I can watch the sun come up.  Or I'll take my camera and shoot pictures in and around the forest preserve because the light is so good.

But usually I just get up, get on my computer, turn on the TV and spend about half  an hour to an hour doing enough stuff to tire out my brain. Then I used to go back to sleep until seven or eight when the crows began their daily cacaphony. Except for the last couple of years there have been no crows. The West Nile Virus decimated them. So other things wake me up.

The other morning after I fell sleep again I dreamed I had colorectal cancer. This wasn't a dream where I knew I was dreaming.  This was a dream that was so real, I woke up completely distressed until I realized that Katie Couric was doing a whole segment about the disease on the Today Show. She was interviewing someone who had the disease. So I'd picked up on the narrative of the woman who was talking and made it part of my dream. Sheesh.

Remind me to turn off the TV when I want to go back to sleep.

This morning, Saturday, I woke up early again, so I turned on the TV, but decided to stay in bed. That meant I got to watch an entire infomercial on ATV's. I now know more about torque, suspension, traction, and dual quads, which seems to be about tires not engines, than I did last night. You watch, it'll come in handy within the next forty-eight hours.

For some reason Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice also decided to buy several time slots in this crack of dawn period. Somebody must have given them a major discount on pre-dawn ads. Or they know there are people like me who are half asleep with the TV on and therefore very suggestible to anything two guys standing hip deep in cranberries have to say. I only remember something about Ninjas, which seemed odd. I do like the Ocean Spray tagline, "Straight from the bog."  Not for any intelligent reason.  It's just that BOG is such a great word. 

I wouldn't want anyone to think I was affected by my Katie Couric dream or anything, but I did call my doctor to get a screening for colon cancer.