It was 9:20 on a Sunday morning when I got up.
I know this might not seem like a big deal to many of you, but many of you aren’t bartenders. I’m lucky enough to not work at a 4:00am bar, but I still work late. (“Shift work” I believe Alan Jackson called it.) Add to that the fact that Saturday is Friday in my world and I’m about to start my weekly 3 day weekend, and next thing you know it’s 4:00am anyway before I’m crawling into bed. So, now do you see why 9:20 is a ridiculous time for me to be awake?
The question then becomes if I’m awake, what am I going to do with this time? The initial answer is not much. It’s taken me two hours to make coffee, take a shower, tidy up a bit and start writing this, and almost all of that was done in the last 30 minutes. My phone makes it easy to lie in bed and scroll through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You know, just in case I missed something important in the world of social media in the previous five hours.
It’s easy to think that the prospect of three days off would be enough to generate excitement that keeps me from sleeping, but if I told you what was planned for today – read the paper, watch some football, work on the novel, grocery shop (if I’m not so lazy as to order take out instead) – you’d be scratching your head about the excitement idea, but I think that might actually be it.
As much as I enjoy going out, having fun, creating excitement, there is a big (and growing bigger every day) part of me that looks forward to the quieter times, the simpler things. I joke about being a snob and having to read the Sunday NY Times, but doing so is more than just learning about what’s going on in the world. I’m a reader – goes hand in hand with being a writer – and there is something meditative about the process of reading. And I mean reading anything: book, magazine, the contents of a bottle of shampoo, whatever. On top of that, there is the process of preparing the paper, setting the order of what will be read when and then starting it all by flipping to the puzzle page of the magazine and jumpstarting the brain.
Excitement comes in many forms, and it doesn’t always have to be the biggest, boldest, brightest thing that makes us the most excited. It’s important to remember that the explosive burst of a firework shell in the night sky looks an awful lot like the downy grey of a simple dandelion ready to cast its spores to the summer wind, and even though one of them is as big as the heavens and the other fits in the palm of our hands, both have the ability to fill us with the feeling of excitement, hope and possibility.
PopcornJackTerry 