“MOURNING
MY MORNING”
by Rick
Jones, Husband of the Minister's Wife
I hate making tough
decisions in the morning. For instance:
I awakened this morning
from an awful dream. It featured me at a young age, first day at an
“entry-level” job, with a supervisor who got his job because he's
the owner's nephew. He knows little about how to do his job, or mine,
and knows even less about personal hygiene. He does knows a plethora
of obscenities, and uses at least three of them in every sentence as
he expresses his displeasure concerning a mistake which [1] I didn't
make and [2] cost the company about $1.25, which is less than the
amount I'll be paid for the time I spend listening to his
onion-breath-saturated tirade.
Suddenly, I hear the lunch
buzzer. It sounds suspiciously like my alarm clock. I wake up
sweating, tense, and frustrated by the fact that I didn't get to tell
off the supervisor before the dream ended.
I open an eye. I'm not
sure which one, but it hurts, even though the room seems darker than
it should. Opening the other eye doesn't help. That probably means
an overcast day, with a storm on the way. Great.
After determining, with
difficulty, which direction is up, I untangle my feet from the sheet
and swing into a sitting position. My foot hits the floor, which
feels damp. Did I forget to take the dog out before going to bed?
No time to think about it – my bladder operates on a gravity
switch, and transitioning from a horizontal position to sitting
triggers the “gung-ho to GO” function, which includes a timer
based on seconds, not minutes. I leap up and, taxing my memory,
vaguely recall the location of the bathroom.
Why can't my sense of
balance kick in as quickly as my bladder? Lurching across the dark
bedroom allows the little toe on my right foot to demonstrate its
purpose in the grand scheme of the universe: locating chair legs in
the dark. That's one toenail I won't have to trim today, since I
think it was torn off in the collision. The little toe now throbs
like it's ballooning to the size of the big toe. I grumble,
“Znnumfumviljk”, quoting a character I saw in a movie -- a zombie
just after its jaw was blown off by a shotgun.
But I'm not walking like
the undead; I take two hops to the left, which gives my knee a chance
to steal the spotlight from the toe by presenting a reenactment of a
car being rammed by a freight train, starring itself and the knob of
a dresser drawer. The room is no longer dark I see flashes of
light caused by the pain. “Kjlivmufmunnz”, I groan, quoting no
one, but expressing a thought that I really shouldn't translate into
English.
I am tempted to collapse,
but my bladder urges me on, its timer counting rapidly toward the
moment when “tick tick tick” will switch to “drip drip drip”.
I continue my trek, reeling like a drunken sailor on a warped deck
during a typhoon. As I reach the bathroom, I feel a moment of envy
for the zombie's lack of tactile sensation.
Whoa! That's cold!
Still, I utter a prayer of gratitude for the toilet seat, which takes
the weight off of my knee and foot. As I lessen the weight in my
bladder, I count my toes to be sure the toenail was all I lost. Then
I clean the dog's morning gift from my foot with a wet cloth. Whoa!
That's cold!
Now, I'm truly awake. I
look at the clock in the bathroom and realize that it's not dark
because the sky is overcast. It's dark because the noise I thought
came from the alarm clock was actually just a noise in the dream. I
woke up two hours before the alarm is set to sound!
So now I have to choose.
Do I stay up and face the day with significantly less sleep than I
usually get? Or do I go to bed and risk going through all of this
again in two hours?
I hate making tough
decisions in the morning.
