Sleepless in Encino

If you don't know the TED talks, search them out on the web. These are 17 minute lectures given to an elite network of people who get together and celebrate creativity. It is an acronym for "Technology, Entertainment and Design". I also think it is the first name of the guy that started the organization, but not sure about that. Al Gore's lecture on global warming started as a 17 minute TED talk. They are free on line and you will get hooked. There is eventually some lecture for anyone's imagination.

One of the lectures that I have only heard on tape and not seen a video of is about "4 o'clock in the morning". A writer has researched the idea that in literature and popular culture, nothing good happens at 4 o'clock n the morning. If a writer is going to specify a time when bad things happen... it is 4 o'clock in the morning. Historically bad things happen at .... 4 o'clock in the morning. His lecture explores the reason for this in a very humorous way. Is it a bad time because it is just bad, or have we used it that way in literature until it has become the devils own time?

All I know is that I keep waking up a 4 0'clock in the morning like I had an alarm clock set. It has been happening for a few weeks, but goes back decades. For most of my life, if I wake up at night it is 4 to 4:30 in the morning. I have always believed that because I was born at 4:30 am my internal clock wants to reset at that time. It is not a very scientific belief, because 4:30 am California time would be 2:30 Texas time since that is the time zone of my birth. It also happens when I am traveling in other time zones, I don't wake up at my birth time but 4:30 local time.

That's too early to just get up and start the day, and since nothing good happens at 4 o'clock in the morning who wants to get up then anyway? I usually listen to my ipod so it will lull me back to sleep with music or some less than stimulating podcast. I am always amazed at how bright and obnoxious the screen of an ipod nano is in the pitch blackness of 4 o'clock in the morning. If I lived on a farm Roosters would crow thinking the screen was the morning sun.

The few things that I have written or drawn at that hour, once I am awaken, prove to me it is not a productive hour. It is 4:30 pm now, that means I have 12 hours till my eyes pop open. I think I better go to bed now.

As you were,

Jay