ME, not a morning person.

MORNING, the morning.

BED, ME’s bed.

PHONE, ME’s phone.

COMPUTER, ME’s computer.

WORK PHONE, ME’s work phone.

This is me. I am not a morning person. I must get to work sometime between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.

This is Bed. Bed swaddles me in layers of warm woollen goodness. In Bed I am quite comfortable at night and equally comfortable in the morning.

This is Morning. Morning glares at me like sunbeams through blinds. In the morning I recoil from Morning, although I know I must surrender myself to her. The responsibility of ensuring this lay originally with Phone.

Phone wakes me up. Phone has an alarm song which rings at 6:30 a.m. Last summer I added another alarm to Phone, which rings at 6:23 a.m. Although I no longer work for NASA, it is labelled “NASA wants you to get up” out of tradition.

These two alarms have a snooze function. When I awake to their bleating bell-tone melodies, I think to myself, let’s tap the snooze button. My hand flies in a wide arc and the middle finger hits its orange target with laser precision. Its job duly accomplished, I reward my arm by letting it go limp. Each alarm lies dormant, waiting to strike again in nine minutes, a cannonade of major arpeggios. After several rounds of battery I forsake the gentle embrace of Bed and surrender my body to the harsh light of Morning.

At first Phone reliably got me up before 7:30 a.m.

Then she reliably got me up before 8 a.m.

Then she reliably got me up before 8:30 a.m.

At some point Morning decided that something must be done and enlisted Computer to her bidding. Computer sits in stately repose upon the desk in my living room. The plan was that Computer would begin to play an alarm in the morning as well, some fraction of an hour after Phone. Being out of arm’s reach, Computer would force me to get out of Bed in order to appease her and quiet her racket. Thus distracted, I would more easily surrender to the wintry whims of Morning.

I programmed Computer to play 8-Bit Falsettos Act I in the morning, but my programming prowess would prove weak. After I left her alone for the evening, she, too, would sleep, and forget to wake in time to rouse me. I consulted the scriptures of Stack Overflow, searching for the incantations which would bind Computer ever more inextricably to Morning’s command, but I gave up.

And so the days passed, every 7 a.m. hour consumed in the great battle between Bed and Morning. Over the months Bed gained the advantage, holding me in her clutches ever more tightly against Morning’s relentless barrage of alarm noise.

Enter Work Phone. Stationed in the far end of the living room, Work Phone would do what Phone, resting on my bed-stand, and Computer, silent in her sleepy majesty, could not. Work Phone was outfitted with an alarm set for 6:55 a.m.

With the mercenary assistance of Work Phone, Morning and Phone would turn the tide against the forces of Bed. Work Phone’s constant assault of mid-high G major would reliably rouse me from Bed at precisely 6:55 for Morning to catch me, suspending me from my gravitational trajectory back to Bed.

But Morning’s fingers grew slippery, and I would fall into Bed soon after disabling Work Phone’s alarm for the day, and we were back to square one.

And then through some strange alchemy on behalf of Bed, even Work Phone’s siren song would fail to call her Odysseus to shore.

Now in the mornings I flap my desultory arm onto Phone’s snooze button at 6:23, 6:30, 6:32, 6:39, 6:41, 6:48, and 6:50. Then I hear Work Phone’s alarm from 6:55 to 7:10, and barely think, huh, that must be Work Phone. Then I turn and sink back, deeper, into Bed’s infinitely warm embrace, a newborn chick shrinking back into her egg.