sleepy logic
The first light of dawn has only a casual contact with my closed eyelids as I am rarely awake before 8:05 and five snoozes, and then I am awake only in the loosest definition, that is to say I am not asleep. At the first (or sometimes the second (or sometimes the third)) beeping of the alarm, when I begin to rouse, tossing about for a harbor to dock my ship and enter the land of awake, my blanket weaves itself around me: I am warmth, it whispers, and there is so much to be warm from. The part of me that knows I have to get up searches for motivation to move. Futile. It tries to reason with me, but in the physiological selfishness that only the not so freshly awake can feel, my mind says that I can't get up yet because I haven't let five black birds fly off the fencepost, something absurd enough to make sense to the mostly asleep.
The next time the alarm screams wake up time, my arm whips out and slams down the snooze button, but between the order to quiet the alarm and the order to wake up, my body gets sidetracked and for the next seven minutes I sleep. I sleep--mostly. There is something in me that thrives in these conditions, is happy where I am; it does not want me to move. This scheming subconscious spends the seven minutes constructively--gathering information, preparing a plan, drawing up tactics of confusion and sleepy logic, ready to throw images of dreams to be completed, a conversation to finish, perhaps with Galileo, Newton, Einstein, my mom, my hamster Houdini (who wouldn't stay in his cage), discussing the universe, corporal punishment, relativity, relative captivity, crabs, apples, crabapples, seeds, singularities, single parity bits, bytes, bats, anything to keep the mind occupied and the body in bed.
The seven minutes pass and the land of awake wants my attention. Again my arm flies out and lands on the snooze, and again it retreats back into the folds of the cover--but was that a stir? Did my legs just stretch? Suddenly I have something important to do; I'm not sure what it is; I only know that I have to stay put until it's done. I think it has something to do with blackbirds, or my mom, or my pet hamster running around in his cage with its perfect geometric shapes, tubes connecting cages to cages, where hamsters run on exercise wheels and gravity is powerless because a hamster has stopped running, is spinning around and around with the wheel, and I watch with amazement. He does not fall. Centripital force, my boy, says a voice from far away, the apple wasn't spinning. I understand now. The apple wasn't spinning. I have to stay here until that's fixed; I have to spread the news to the people; I have to make sure they spin their apples daily. And another seven minutes goes by.