by Jeff McMahon
When everyone clusters around the java pot in the morning, I'm the guy in the corner with the squinty red eyes. Sometimes someone says "good morning."
"Mublin'," I mutter.
"Hey, you look tired," the someone inevitably says.
"Thanks."
"Up all night?"
"Nah."
"What the hell's wrong with you, then?"
"I'm not a morning person!"
Morning people are easy to spot. They wake up smiling. They sing chipper little ditties in the shower. They confront you with complex ideological paradigms while you're pulling up your socks. They're usually the ones who say, "Hey, you look tired."
Night people are easy to spot, too. We've got our hands clasped on the coffee mug, squeezing its warmth, our faces bent into the spiced steam. Purple crescents underline our eyes. We squint beneath fluorescent lights. Our skin is pale. We get lively about the time everyone else goes home.
And we're oppressed.
People who feel refreshed and lively at dawn dominate the world in a way Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, and Reagan could only dream of. It's not because morning people have a bigger bomb, either, something those aforementioned gents never figured out. It's because while night people are stumbling through god-forsaken mornings like the living dead, the early risers are writing the rules.
Take the 8 to 5 workday for example. This custom originated during the Spanish Inquisition, when bemasked fiends employed by an angry church plotted new ways to torture people who sleep in. And what unholy torture it is. Night people would sooner sandpaper their eyeballs than work at 8 a.m. I mean, you can see your breath at 8 a.m.
That's what the morning is forólooking at your breath and reflecting on its continued presence. But we must go to work. So we sit at our desks, trying to focus our bleary eyes on computer screens, trying to remember what to say when the telephone rings.
"Hello?... Hello?"
One wise former employer of mine allowed employees to come to work when they were ready, instead of forcing them to abide by an arbitrary, offensive hour. Not only did everyone arrive charged, but the boss found his office open to the public longer. The morning people unlocked the doors at 8 a.m., whistling happy tunes. The night people locked them at 10 p.m., whistling happy tunes.
That's too radical a concept, however, for a society that scorns night creatures. What's our little national maxim? "The early bird catches the worm," right?
Benjamin Franklin, America's most annoying early bird, felt threatened by night owls. He thought up cutesy sayings to deride them. For instance: "Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough." And who could forget: "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
Where's that leave people who stay up late and sleep inósickly, poor, and stupid? I don't think so, Ben. We could make money at 8 p.m. as easily as 8 a.m., except that morning people control the stock market. And if we're unhealthy, it's because we have to get up so damn early.
Human hearts prefer slow transitions from rest to activity to rest again. Night-writer James Thurber expressed the coronary consequences of early rising when he said, "Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead."
Thurber's right. Get up before dawn and dash off to work? That's not what mornings are for. Mornings are for waking up slowly next to a warm and lovely friend, while yellow light spreads across rumpled sheets. There's plenty of time for work later. Much later. Night-person/poet Ezra Pound knew this:
"Dawn enters with little feet, like a gilded Pavlova, and I am near my desire. Nor has life in it aught better than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together."
Notice Ezra said "the hour of waking together," not "the minute of dashing to the shower." The early birds caught Ezra's worm, however, and they locked him up in an asylum.
When the sun sets, people like Ezra and I blossom like evening primrose. We're ready to conquer the world. Of course, by then the world has fallen asleep.
In "Dracula" a 1931 film celebrating the ultimate night person, Bela Lugosi says, "Leesten to them... the cheeldren of the night... what music they make."
Bela wasn't just talking about wolves, bats, and owls. He was talking about coffeehouse poets, subway musicians, and streetwalkers. Forlorn souls who bay at the moon.
For some of us it just feels right, ransacking used-bookstore shelves at midnight, wandering barren streets in search of elusive love, hunching over steaming mochas while the cafe light streams into black night. Cities like San Francisco and New Orleans were made for us.
Nightcrawlers flock to the cities and huddle against the early-riser throng, alongside the rest of the oppressed. Yet even San Francisco clings to the tyranny of the 8 to 5 workday. We have so far to go.
Write your legislators and newspapers. Call your local talk shows. Educate them about the need for an Americans with Nocturnal Orientations Act. It would prevent employers from discriminating on the basis of a person's internal clock.
They'll fight us, the morning people. They'll fight us every hour of the day. They'll get up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and speak scornfully of us at greasy egg breakfasts. They'll drive stakes of rhetoric through our hearts.
But they must sleep sometime. They must. And the night belongs to us. The long, deep night.
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This column was part of a package of three that won first place from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 1996.
"It is no time for mirth and laughteró
The cold, gray dawn of the morning after."
óGeorge Ade
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