I woke up this morning to total darkness. This daylight savings time change is still kicking my ass, majorly disproportionate to the one hour change. So, on some days, at 4:00 AM, it feels like 7:00 AM, and when I go to the kitchen to make some late lunch, the clock on the wall above the sink shouts, “It is 10:00 AM! What in the world are you doing!..!!”. Then, of course, dinner at 3:00 PM, and in bed by 6:00 PM.

This morning it was something else. I just laid there in bed, in cloaking darkness, already fatigued by the major challenges that lie ahead. Huh? Joe, you are retired. Obligated to nothing and no one. You can watch football in your underwear with snack fragments cascading down the folds of your t shirt. You can put the trash out at the street every other week. You can leave the truck in the garage and avoid getting it inspected for another six months. So what challenges?

Well, for one thing, I have to take my medication or some part of my body or mind will stop or fall off. Eight types of medication seems a bit much. Then I have to brush my teeth. Two minutes of power washing and gum massaging. Then shower. My God, how did I accumulate so much surface area and so many irregular forms that twenty minutes of work with shampoo, soap, washcloth and scrub brush can barely get the job done? Shave? No way. I don’t have to leave the house until November 17th.

Then there is getting dressed. Open the closet, pull out a pair of sweats that don’t have missing pocket liners, or too many paint splatters, or missing ankle end elastic. T-shirt? Pick one of twenty gray Russells, each one with its own personality, or go rogue and pick navy or black? Socks? The new ones that fit well with the two color toe stripe, or save the good socks and go with the old and disfigured white crew socks? The ones that postpone another $28 sock purchase?

Prayers, lots of them, then onto finding my FitBit, wallet and cell phone in the dark. Can’t turn the lights on frivolously in the face of my most recent Central Maine Power bill. Not if I want to pay my near winter fuel oil and propane bills. Down the sixteen steps to the living room and another round of medication before heading for the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

My third frying pan this year. Sirens all. Each luring me to a promise of non sticking eggs whites due to their respective miracle surface of varying, but all failing, coating technologies. The single serve coffee makers spits and hisses, spraying coffee on a counter I will then have to clean. Microwaved bacon will be reduced from a guilt evoking size serving to a burnt micro accordion that barely registers with taste buds.

An effort to flip eggs, to accommodate their future as an omelet, ends largely in tragedy when a misjudged motion puts half of the egg mass in the pan and half on the stove top where it will bubble and turn black. Then I will look at the mess, turn off the stove, and settle for a cup of dark roast black coffee in front of the morning TV news. One channel will be war. One will be political malfeasance. Another judicial misconduct. Yet another air crash or weather catastrophe with the promise of more to come.

Good Lord, why do I do it? So I sat up in bed, rotating and lifting so as not to dislocate anything of great importance, put my feet on the bedroom floor and gave myself a pep talk. Joe, get off your lazy ass and get going. Have you considered the alternative? And I start humming a song from 1962… Thanks Bob.