Brody's Scribbles... One Of Those Mornings

By Bart Vogelzang | VANCOUVER ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA -- Did you ever have one of ‘those’ mornings? If you have, you’ll know what I mean. The alarm goes off, 2 hours early because ‘some moron’ set it wrong. You finally get back to sleep about 5 minutes before you’re supposed to be getting up, and you’re groggy as hell, completely uncoordinated.

As you try to sit up to get out of bed, your feet get tangled in the sheets, dragging the mess onto the floor. Reaching for your glasses doesn’t help much, because you knock them flying between the bed and the nightstand, which wouldn’t be so bad but as you search for them, now on your knees, you feel ‘something’ moving over your fingers.

Your frightened squeal and quick retraction of your arm signals the start to the rest of the day…it’s not looking good, as your elbow smashes into the side of the nightstand, which teeters for a moment before depositing the bedside lamp onto the floor, the lampshade twisted into an ironic grimace just for your benefit. Still without your glasses, you resume the search, having put a dirty sock over your hand to protect you from the wildlife living back there somewhere. Yes!!! You have your glasses, albeit looking the worse for wear as they are now covered in what looks like miniature tribbles or or some perverted mutations of dust bunnies. Of the alien lifeform under the bed, there is no sign, and you’re not about to start looking, ever!

Time to head to the bathroom, as the bladder pressure is nearly too hard to bear, but sadly the sheets are still bunched up on the floor, so…you guessed it; a precipitous fall onto the floor, bringing you, sadly, face to face with the SPIDER FROM HELL. Not only is it huge, but its eyes seem to gleam with malevolence, and it seems to be daring you to invade its space under your bed, as it postures in mimicry of your movements; sort of like the sidewalk dances we’ve all come to hate, move to the right just as the other person does, move to the left at the same moment, reconsider and both don’t move, only to both move exactly the same way again, totally confounding each other. Slowly you back up, away from the arachnid menace, and, quickly grabbing the bunched up sheets, stuff it in the open space to block its access to you.

Finally in the bathroom, now without that urgent bladder pressure, you rinse off your glasses and then start to brush your jungle mouth away, because you have learned in the past that if you can smell your own breath, it is very bad indeed. Dropping your toothbrush into the sink with the remnants of the dead dust bunny carcasses doesn’t help your mood much, and several minutes of scrubbing the bristles to clean them before putting them back in your mouth doesn’t make you feel a whole lot better. Maybe a nice shower will do the trick and turn the corner on your ‘wonderful’ morning.

Not bloody likely. You have one of those showers where the water cascades into a bathtub, and soon get the water started. After successfully getting your right foot into the tub, you lift your left foot too little to clear the edge of the tub, and you quickly get the message by means of a searing pain in your longest toe, which has now made intimate and devastating contact with that nice hard and shiny porcelain veneer. Staggering forward, you hit the tiles and can hear at least one of them cracking, but it doesn’t really bother you as much as the feeling of slipping helplessly downwards as your feet slide from beneath you. Fortunately, there’s not much further to fall than the bottom of the tub, and that trickle of blood from some body part doesn’t seem to be matched by any obvious new pain. A moment or two of exploration to find the small cut on one hand, presumably the tile breaker one, and you’re back on your feet, one of which is still hurting like you’d kicked a porcelain tub or something. Ha ha. You have to laugh at the stupidity of it all. The water, particularly once you turn it to cold, refreshes you, washing away the cobwebs, the ones in your mind, not any remnants of the alien menace encountered minutes earlier.

“Son of a …”. No towel to dry off. Well, nothing for it but to parade naked through to the laundry room. Don’t you hate it when you get lazy and don’t put stuff away? Don’t you hate it even more when you haven’t even done the laundry, and you have to grab a dirty towel out of the hamper…one that stinks of old sweat and worse, mildew? Can the day get any worse? Oh dear, NEVER ask that!

Socks are on, although how you manage to get the heel part on the top of your left foot is anyone’s guess, but maybe the pain in the toe is a good excuse. Pants are fine, although the shirt seems a bit crooked and there seems to be a button too many on one side and too many holes on the other. Strange…must be that spider’s doing. The belt is funny too, having developed a twist in it. Okay, not the spider’s fault. It’s from eating dead dust bunny mutations.

Breakfast is next on the agenda. Suffice to say that blackened toast is not nearly as carcinogenic as charred non-stick frying pan, so be happy. The smoke detector battery being dead was probably a good thing, although smelling like you’re a firefighter who fought in a plastics factory is not particularly a marketable fragrance for anyone. Anyway, you’ve eaten, if you can call that food, and the only real delay to getting away is forgetting to take the car keys with you after leaving the house, which is not really all that much of a frustration, except that the keys are attached to the same ring as the house keys. Oops.

All is not lost though, since you’ve done this before, and made plans for it, by giving a spare set to your neighbor across the street. A quick dodging around that car after tripping off the sidewalk from stepping on a stone that rekindled that pain in your left foot’s toe, and you are knocking on your friend’s front door. A moment of silence is heard, then a crash, a squeal, then the words, “Aaaaa, spider from hell, spider from hell.” Looks like you’re not the only one having one of those mornings.