It’s Too Early For Anything But Puppies
AS I GET UP THIS MORNING and turn on the TV all I see is hurricanes and candidates. There’s not much difference when you get down to it – a lot of hot air passing through, and people getting soaked. The hurricane blows down homes and the candidates blow down people’s dreams with nonsensical promises for things they can never deliver.
And so my Saturday morning begins. I get up, get dressed so I don’t scare the neighbors, make tea and do the crossword puzzle in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star newspaper (Terre Haute – That’s French for, “We’re lucky. So far the candidates have missed us.”)
I know, I know, you’re reading this on a Wednesday. Well, I do try to stay a few days ahead of things. I’m not going to get up and immediately sit down at my computer to write something for that day. I have enough trouble making tea while half awake. God knows what would come out of my brain if I tried to write something coherent at 7 AM. I fear it would end up like an old joke –
“They say that if you chained 25 monkeys to 25 typewriters, eventually, one of them would type ‘Hamlet.’
“Last month Government tried that experiment and after the first week, nine of them had already typed ’50 Shades of Gray.’”
The joke lives on because you just plug in the latest bestseller that gets panned by critics. The first time I heard that joke the book cited was “Valley of the Dolls.”
So, here I sit on a Saturday morning slumped over my coffee at a corner table in St. Arbucks hitting the keys on my ancient, wood-burning Toshiba netbook. I have yet to succumb to the lure of tablets and the other “Flavor of the Month” electronic toys.
When I get up on a Saturday I usually try to avoid the news channels because they just overwhelm me with urgent looks and hyperbole as they try to make whatever they are reading off of the Teleprompter make sense. It’s more than I can deal with before coffee or Noon, whichever comes first. Instead of CNN or Fox or whatever, I find myself tuning in to the Animal Planet Channel and watching kittens and puppies. That I can handle. The Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves (to quote Cher) can wait until after lunch.
I kind of enjoy quiet mornings. For years, decades really, I was moving at a pace that wore me out. I was often out in the clubs until closing time, then up and on the necessary “day job” at 8 AM. Weekends were no relief. There were often two shows or running from club to club for stage time. During the day there would be classes or rehearsals and, if you were lucky, a chance to do your laundry. Doing a play was easier than running the club circuit. In a real theater you knew when the show started and finished and Actors tended to be more sociable than Comedians (I’m going to get flak on that.).
Oh, well. So it goes. It is Saturday morning. I have coffee in front of me and there will be kittens on the TV when I get home. And I know that my wife loves me.
Life is good.
Down the Hall on Your Left 