Out the hazy dream my consciousness was beginning to leak out of this morning, I heard the familiar sound of my alarm – a single gentle beep. Automatically, I ricocheted my arm diagonally upward pounding my Kleenex box with rigour. I had inadvertently placed my alarm clock on the wrong side of the nightstand.
I am a creature of habit. I sometimes wish I were someone who created traditions that held a weaving of intimate meaning, something akin to lighting incense before morning mediation and yoga. I, however, only usually just stumble blearily toward my TV and pop the necessary buttons.
Did you notice that I walk to my TV to turn it on? The TV in my bedroom is a relic from my childhood; it’s the very first TV I got when I was 12 or 13. Now still in my bedroom, it is the very first thing I do in the morning. I have a quiet, yet sincere belief that bits of the world might have fallen off the map while I was drooling on my pillow. These things I must know, you know, for travel purposes.
NBC is my favorite. The local news has a genuinely mellow, yet upbeat female anchor saying names of streets and intersections in the larger town they broadcast out of about an hour away. Traffic jams, bridge waits, all things I have absolutely no need for – entirely soothing as I readjust to the land of the living. About a year ago, they introduced a young, black weatherman that you just knew was not from around here. Chester Lampkin. They don’t make names like that around these parts.
But he certainly had chutzpa for the lingo when he started the job. He had taken upon himself to enunciate the Spanish in our town names to a cloying degree with an unsure clamor of Aaaaahs and a throaty El. I would mimic them back to him and chuckle. I off-handly told a co-worker about my sincere affection for Chester and his slow spiral of toward Gringoization of town names. “I love him too,” she declared, “Chester – what a name!”
The tell-tale grandeur of seven o’clock would then ring out with the arrival of the Today show. Matt Lauer’s fluctuation between mid-life crisis to utter contempt was my version of morning coffee. His clear demonstration of contempt for Roker or his unhidden apathy for celebrities he interviewed (only to be playfully aroused by a feral Tom Cruise), this was the snark of the world that I loved and found strange, strange comfort in.
Posted by firewings 
