Sleepy Time Blues

Dear Sister La Cienega

Why is it I'm more alert when I wake up at 6 AM at least in the short 
term? As I write this it’s 9:00 am and I’m groggy and feel like crap.  I have just turned 50 and was wondering if this is a symptom of middle age and is it something I will have to look forward to on a daily basis?

Sincerely,
Zonked in Canada.

Dear, Zonked in Canada,

My child, this is quite normal for someone entering that I like to call ‘The Wonder Years’. You see, when you wake up in the morning, your are awake, and once awake life seems wonderful, peaceful, and in most cases, stress free, however, the body and soul have an internal dialogue going on that you may not be aware of. It goes something like this.

-Wow, awake.
- Hey body, good morning, but before we get started I would just like to remind you that in this journey of what fools call life, we have come further than we are going. 
- What do you mean?
-Well, the path ahead of us is a bit shorter than the path behind us, take a look, it’s quite obvious.
- But what has that have to do with me?
-OMG, you’ve got to be joking.
- No.
- Two words: Scrunch. Time.
- Scrunch time?
- Yeah, things that use to take forever now fly by; things that use to fly by now take forever.
-Really?
- Yes, really, remember as a kid, it was mid-summer and you had that double scoop of chocolate chip mint ice cream and were in heaven for all of ten minutes and then it was, gone, forgotten and life went on. Well with Scrunch Time, you can choose to eat that sane double scoop now and will end up sitting on it for the next year. 
- Damn.

So you see my dear, the body can be so naïve at times and it’s up to the soul to try and smooth things out.  That is where the confusion sets in. Now revisiting your dilemma on grogginess, let’s apply the scrunch time theory here and see how this plays out.

Arising at 6:00 AM you are not groggy because you are awake and once awake, grogginess has a tendency to set in and if you remember with the ST Theory - things that use to take forever will now fly by- however you must be awake for this to take place, you can't continue to tire when sleeping, sleeping creates un-tired.  That is why you went to sleep in the first place. Now with all this taken into consideration it only proves that once awake one instantly begins to get tired or groggy as scrunch time kicks in. Stephan Hawking would like to call this a Space Time Continuum but then again, he is such an attention whore and if I were you I wouldn’t pay him much mind.

To further elaborate my point: Christmas Day for a kid seems like such a long way off from the month of May, and just like summer vacation appears to last forever is because kids have little to associate time with. Time is relative to ones desires , for most don’t see time as now, but as something that has a starting point and an ending point. The ending point of course being somewhere down the line.  The younger you are, the further the destination in question seems to be.

A child’s whole frame of reference is built on a couple years. Every increment is a bigger piece of their life. As you get older, every increment is a smaller piece, the denominator is bigger."

Therefore It is my summation that scrunch time works in the same way when one wakes up in the morning; one feels awake, feels great and then before you know it, bamn, and one is groggy. This is because groggy does not have any notion as to what time it is. So in essence you are going from awake to groggy in what I would like to call a Day Worm Hole.  I know this seems to be a little complicated but in time once the grogginess passes it will make sense, or perhaps not.

Toodles
Sister La Cienega

Comments

[Sasha]

OMG...

[ALvin]

Thanks Sasha, that was my first OMG and the first is always the best.

[Nathaniel Dodsworth]

Scrunch time. So that's what it's called!