Carpe Diem Freaky Morning People

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
– Ben Franklin, famously

It sends chills down my spine, this axiom of Franklin's. I do not sing in the shower welcoming the new day as a gift from our Creator. I am not a pre-10 AM self-starter. I do not let my first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is certain to echo through my entire day.

Frankly I have no idea what happens before 9. I'm not coherent in that timeframe. But while I'm strewn out on my petard, come to find out the Morning People are gloriously prancing about checking priority to-do's off their ambitious daily plans. By the time I get to work, it's practically the next day for them. Each and every crack of noon, I hear about the miles run, the pages turned, the hostile takeovers accomplished.

So you can't blame me for concluding there's some sort of occult jubilee that goes on at dawn in which time is warped and one hour becomes like seven or eight. All the Morning People clasp hands and murmur and a productivity portal opens in the time-space continuum. Then there's a big party where the Morning People whoop it up with fiesta maracas and day-glo pants.

I had been feeling so bereft and forlorn due to my tragic inability to shake my money maker beneath the majesty of the rising sun. But then I learned three things which made me pretty happy even if I'm so D-List for the Morning People Party:

1) After Zumba on Tuesday, I said to Leslie that after about midnight, I didn't get much done except putzing around, and she said and I quote, "Well if I get up really early I just putz around until I have to get ready to leave." Aha! Not all Morning People receive yods of fruitfulness raining down upon them from heaven. Some of them might as well be slacker Night People.

2) When he read Ben's "early to bed, early to rise" advice, George Washington was quoted to respond: "I don't see it."

And 3) Facts add up to Ben Franklin smack talking. Not for nothing, in between his statesmanship and jotting down bons mots, he managed to find time, quite a lot of time, to take part in wildly blasphemous ceremonies that invariably culminated in drunken orgies involving randy ladies dressed as nuns.

Unless this is what he meant by "early to bed."