My Morning Jacket Embarrassment

I’m not much of a morning person.

I’m the type of guy who hits the snooze button anywhere from two to fourteen times before finally stirring enough to be deemed “awake.”

Once I’m up, however, there is usually only a brief period of walking dead syndrome before I really wake up to the point where I’m functional. That tipping point usually involves music. Loud music.

Most mornings, I crawl out of bed. Head to the bathroom and turn on the radio to the local country station. I then jam out in the shower to the recent hot songs by Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Montgomery Gentry or whomever else is rocking the charts at the time.

This is often enough to get me wide-awake and good to go for the day.

Some mornings, however, it’s just not that easy. Friday morning was one of those mornings. I woke up, did the usual shower and loud music routine and was still dragging. Making matters even worse—oh yes, it gets worse—I had to operate sans-super caffeine for most of the day. That’s right, I had to settle for a Starbucks’ Doubleshot and a Mt. Dew.

It is, in fact, a hard knock life.

Anywhoozle, so to make up for my lack of super caffeine and the ineffective shower, I did the only thing a dude in my situation could do, I put in my earbuds and took to the stacks.

I had to open the library anyway and—as I’ve mentioned before—I like to make the most of this otherwise innocuous task.

As such, I cranked the iPod (that’s a second generation shuffle for those of you who are curious) and hit play.

So there I was rocking out to Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” in the stacks of a dark, empty library at 8:45am on a Friday morning.

I’m busting out my best singing voice (read: death calls of a moose) and my finest dance moves (read: flailing about as if on ALL of the narcotics) when who should I happen upon? Well by golly, it’s just some random electrician who was in the library working on the elevator restoration project.

Needless to say, stumbling upon a very burly gentlemen sitting in the dark in an otherwise abandoned library put a bit of a hitch in my giddy-up. He was nice enough to not mock me unmercifully for my transgressions and I was nice enough not to scream like a frightened child and flail at him in a complete panic with my noodle-like arms.

He explained that he’d simply gotten off the internal elevator on the wrong floor looking for the restroom and didn’t know where he was going. It turned out that when I found him just leisurely hanging in the dark (like a total f’n whacko) he was waiting to hear back from one of his buddies on the walkie-talkie.

I found this explanation to be far less frightening than the “I’ve been waiting here to eat your face with some spicy brown mustard and a decorative collectible spoon!” explanation that I’d anticipated upon first encountering the fellow.

We then parted ways, but not before he slyly asked “good song, huh?” with a smirk and then moved along.

There was a brief, ever-so-fleeting moment where I realized that I could get away with killing him and stuffing his body in the hollow space in the library walls and no one would ever know of my Friday morning Pinkstravaganza.

…then I remembered that this dude was, like, three times my size and would easily dispatch me without breaking a sweat. I also realized that I’m apt to blog about all of the minutiae in my life and this event certainly qualifies. There’s really no point in killing a dude if you’re going blog about it a day later anyway, right?

I guess the only upshot is that I wouldn’t have endured an entire morning on the circulation desk chock-full of elevator repair men smiling an all-too-knowing smile my way every time they sauntered by the desk.

Anyway, you’ve survived my ass-rambling this long, you might as well get a treat, here’s the official video to the song I was massacring in a manner usually reserved for old Italian men in delicatessens (…butchers, get it?! because I “butchered” the lyr…oh nevermind).

Also, for those of you who are curious—and actually going to watch the video—my dance moves were pretty much identical to the bespectacled gentleman who shows up around the 2:15 mark and rocks out clean through the rest of the video.

Enjoy…