Adventures
in Poetry
with
Copyright
Dr. Wes
Browning
Throw Them to the 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.
My new motto: "Throw the morning people to the morning lions!" |
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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