Christopher Saint's Humor Column

Getting Up in the Morning: Why Bother?


In the early morning, when you are waking up to begin the daily ritual of eating, working, playing, and scratching, do you ever find yourself repeating some simple phrases? If so, are the phrases any of these:

"Why am I getting out of bed?"

"UGH, I feel like crap!"

"I really don't want to get up."

"Why in God's name is there a bird on my face?!"

If you do find yourself saying these phrases in the morning, then perhaps you suffer from a malady very similar to my own. I call it "Morning Deficiency" because in the morning, I am deficient...of pretty much everything.

Because I am part bat, I am always up late at night. In fact, I don't even sleep at night anymore. I go to sleep around 6 AM and sleep until about 3 PM. So, the very idea of "getting up" in the morning is sick to me. When morning rolls around, I'm finally "laying down", and I will have no truck with any of this "getting up" crap.

Needless to say (but I'm saying it anyway, because that's the kind of needless sayer I am), this creates certain difficulties when I get a morning shift at work because I don't even get around to laying down until it's nearly time for me to get up. So I usually get, at the most, three hours of sleep.

Waking up in the morning is like a form of torture for me. The alarm clock goes off--oh what a hated sound--and I jerk awake, bleary and angry. I beat the alarm clock into submission, maybe hitting it a couple more times than necessary and hoping against hope that it breaks. Then I lay back down, rub my eyes, and try to work up the will to actually leave the bed.

Finally, I do. I rise like some kind of waking dead and stumble about my room a bit, wondering what I should be doing. Usually I trip over shoes, or books, or something else, which doesn't make my mood any more decent or long-suffering. I am not at my most humanitarian in the morning.

Soon, however, I regain some presence of mind, and I realize that I am supposed to be getting ready for work. Still tripping, I go about the task of finding the clothes I'm going to wear today. This is generally pretty easy, as my clothes are placed according to a very scientific system, rivaling the Dewy Decimal system for complexity. My system, worked out over years of experimentation, consists of the "clean pile," the "dirty pile," and the "stuff that I can't find and therefore don't need."

I hit up the clean pile for my pants and shirt, and usually find my socks in a drawer (next to the clean pile) or in my hamper (which is allocated to clean stuff, but is next to the dirty pile). If necessary, I will forage in the dirty pile for a shirt or pants that are only "semi-dirty" as in, dirty enough to be declared dirty, but not dirty enough to actually wash yet.

After I have acquired the correct assortment of clothing, I then asses my own state of cleanliness, and, based on that assessment, take a shower or not. Usually I have taken a shower the night before, in which case I then put on the clothing, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and declare myself "ready". By "ready" I mean that I am in a state of hating my life, and hating the world, and hating morning in a very personal way, but I'll survive. Then I head off to work. On the way there, I usually am able to wake up more, and I begin to feel better. Also, shouting at the traffic helps to release some of my baser emotions.

It's always better after I actually start doing things. Once work begins, things get much better, at least for a while.

So, I much prefer waking up at a decent hour, like 3 pm. If you have the same problem that I do, then perhaps you will benefit from a solution a good doctor friend of mine recommended: "Go through your usual routine of being awake all night, but instead of going to sleep in the morning, throw yourself off a bridge into oncoming highway traffic. It will be a lot less painful than actually trying to get up in the morning."

Today's humor column is entitled:

You May Have Just Won One Million Dollars!

Because we know that you haven't, and we just wanted to rub that in. Actually, today's humor column-- which should have been written a couple of days ago--is about writer's block, because that's what I have. And no, Writer's Block isn't a font, although it could be now that you mention it. It wouldn't have any actual characters in it though, so you'd get into your word processor and switch from Times New Roman to Writer's Block, and then you'd type and you'd get this:


followed by:


and last but not least, a lot of:



You could lose entire documents just by changing fonts. It would be a beautiful thing. Anyway, here is today's humor column:







Ha ha! Got you! Right, really, no kidding now. Here is the column:

As a writer, I feel--for some odd reason--that I should be writing something.

This is a strange and inexplicable feeling that plagues writers everywhere.

The basic reasoning is this: fishermen fish, baseball players play baseball, zamboni drivers drive zambonis, etc. So, writers are supposed to write, aren't they?

Personally, I think that this is a myth propagated by publishing houses who want actual books to publish. The fools. Don't they know that writing is supposed to be a job where you do nothing, get paid, and travel to cool places to sign books and talk to fans?

"You have to write a book to have a book to sign." You might say, but I never said you had to sign YOUR OWN book. I would be perfectly happy getting paid to sign someone else's books and talk with someone else's fans. I'm not choosy.

I could live in the lap of luxury and pretend to be, say, J.K. Rowling. Or Tom Clancy. Or someone like that. Then I could go to Harry Potter book signings and talk about the series, and my ambitions for the series, what I plan to write about in the next books, and why I hate movie producers for fowling up my stories.

Admittedly, I'd have to fudge in a few areas; some of the more annoying fans would probably ask, "Why don't you look anything like J.K. Rowling?" To which I would reply, "What are you? Sherlock Holmes? Are you calling me a liar? Don't answer that, just take this autographed book and get out of here kid. NEXT!"

Or, being a writer, I could make something up. Hey, it's what I do: "Well, my child. One day when I was signing books in a small Russian town called Chernobyl, a nuclear meltdown happened, and I was deformed hideously. So I had to have plastic surgery, but unfortunately the surgeons got the wrong blueprints, and this is how I turned out. I'm learning to live with it actually, though it is difficult."

Yes indeed, this sounds like quite a promising career.

Maybe I should make it into some kind of business, Look-A-Likes R Us. I would hire people who look exactly like famous writers, then train them to talk and act and write signatures like the famous writers, then hire them out to the famous writers as doubles. That way, when, say, Stephen King is hard at work on a new novel and doesn't want to be bothered with a stupid book signing, or a silly promotional thing, he could hire a Look-A-Like for only 10 dollars per hour, then send them to the book signing in his place. It's brilliant.

Anyway, the point of all this is that as a writer I feel that I should be writing something. And, I'm infinitely annoyed when I can't think of anything to write. This not-thinking-of-anything-to-write is called writer's block. There are whole books you can read about how to conquer writer's block, and entire other books about how to find "inspiration".

Inspiration is like Cocaine for writers. If you can get some Inspiration, then you fly really high on it for a little while, but then the Inspiration wears off, and you come crashing down into the dark abyss of writer's block. You wander for days, stumbling about, smacking into walls, tripping and bruising your head, calling out for help but finding none.

But then, just when you think things are hopeless, and you might have to get a day job (actually, for those of us who aren't professionals, we already have day jobs...sigh, it's a cruel world that makes one work for one's money, at least those of us who are too stuck-up to beg and too snooty to starve), you find a tiny bit of inspiration, like a quarter on the sidewalk.

You have a tiny idea of what to write next, but, you don't really know how to use that idea. So the quarter, it turns out, is stuck to the sidewalk with three-week-old chewing gum. Blast! You struggle with the quarter for a while, but then you give up, and go sit on the grass. There you stay, watching the quarter listlessly, wishing you could have it, and use it. But now you are in a state of Procrastination, which is when you know what you should do, but don't, because you are a lazy son of a gun who wants to not have to work for money.

So you sit there, staring longingly at the quarter, hoping that maybe, if you stare hard enough, you will soften the gum.

Anyway, that is a state that I find myself in far too often. I haven't really figured out what to do about it, except that usually if I just sit down and start writing something random, things come to me. Like this article/column/thing. I said to a friend of mine: "I have writer's block, curse my stupid brain." And she said, "Why don't you write about your writer's block?" And I said, "Wow. Why didn't I think of that." And that is how the last several hundred words came into being.

So, there you have it. I'm not sure what you have, but you have it, that's for sure. I'm considering selling It on e-bay to see if I can get any money for It, but I'm not sure. Because most people just seem to have It, which would mean that selling It would be pretty useless. Besides, how do you pitch something like this?

"Get yourself some It! It's great!"

Right. Y'all have a good week now, ya hear?