Lights Out

Summertime, and the living is easy. Well, it's easier, at any rate. I stay up later than usual and get up later than usual. This time shift is mediated by living in a household with a dog and a ten-year-old boy, but I felt very smug last night when I was able to stay up long enough to get halfway through the new "Harry Potter" book. I felt the same sense of mild triumph when I lived through our whirlwind trip to Los Angeles earlier this month. In the middle of this flurry of activity and late nights, a friend of mine who is also a parent asked how I was coping. I told him that I had finally found a reason to be glad for my prior substance use. I figured that if I could get out of bed and just be exhausted without the hangover, survival was pretty much assured.
This is why I was mighty chagrined at the sight of cots being rolled into the back rooms of the U.S. Senate last week. Don't these people know what an all-nighter is supposed to be? I saw the pizzas being delivered, but where were the cases of Jolt Cola, and industrial sized tubs of Vivarin? I'm pretty sure that Claude Rains wasn't curled up on a roll-away bed while Jimmy Stewart was working himself up into a lather in "Mister Smith Goes To Washington." On the contrary, I'm reasonably sure that as soon as he was finished with his big cigar, he met with his cronies to work up some nefarious scheme to bring down our idealistic junior senator. There was no lying down. When it was all over, there were no bushels of telegrams telling either side to throw in the towel, just a meaningless fifty-two to forty-seven vote that allowed everyone to feel like they gave it their all.
Wow. Now I do feel tired. I think I'll go grab a nap.