Becoming a Morning Person
At some point I became a morning person. I guess there was a period of my early childhood where I was an early riser. I remember setting my Mickey Mouse alarm to wake up at 7:00 AM as a young child and then spending mornings making myself eggs sunny-side up, listening to the radio (1280 AM Radio AAHS), drinking Folgers instant coffee with the sunrise.
But anyone who knew me from my teenage years on knew that I was a night owl. I usually stayed up until 2:00–4:00 AM or later and crashed until late the next morning. I have had difficulty sleeping most of my life, but especially as a teen. I took to staying up late on the family computer, or listening to music, or writing, or composing songs. This compulsion to stay up late would translate to events with my friends, where we would frequently pull all-nighters. We would stay up late playing video games or getting into all kinds of minor trouble.
The nights were creative. I took hushed recordings at 2:00 AM with voice and nylon-string guitar coming through on my 4-track Portastudio with the crickets and tree frogs in the background, songs now long lost to the abyss of creative output I never bothered to preserve. Those songs were abandoned to those nights, which now live only in my memory and belong to nobody but me.
At some point I became a 20-something, and this pattern continued, but with alcohol in the mix. In those days I was definitely a night owl, except for working days, since I was working at one point 7:00 AM–4:00 PM. Those were the days of working in the call center at Wells Fargo, in the building off 35W where the whole road bends. Everyone who drives 35W in or out of Minneapolis with any regularity knows that bend in the road and that building, the old Honeywell complex with three connected buildings (old, newer, and newest). We used to sit up on the fifth floor of the glass shard of the newest building and watch the car crashes and traffic backed up on 35W during rush hour, grateful we weren’t stuck in that mess.
In those days I was going to bars and living quite the nightlife, and it was the same with a lot of my friends, so I was used to being a late night guy. We’d stay out until bar close and then walk or take the train home, where inevitably the shenanigans would continue. I generally partied most nights by myself as well, which eventually landed me in a 30-day rehab program at age 27.
After I got out of rehab, I moved back in with my parents for a while. During these days I stayed a night owl, even though I was working hard during the day too. I didn’t have any friends anymore, and I kept mostly to myself. The main reason I kept such late hours was because that was the time I could be alone. Not that I didn’t enjoy my parents’ company too, I just needed some “me” time. In those days, during a manic episode, I wrote, performed, and produced a 10-song album over the period of a couple of months from first chord to final mix. I called it The Seasons of Our Youth and dedicated it to the probable first quarter of my life.
I bought my house in Columbia Heights and around the same time met Annemarie. She and I were night owls together. We would frequently go out late and spend until sunrise driving around or getting into some shenanigans. Like those nights we spent running to Walmart to buy cheap novelty t-shirts as a joke that I nevertheless wore until they fell apart. The more wolves on the shirt, the better, generally, was the rule. We honeymooned in Thailand, where, while she slept, I’d nocturnally roam the city streets. In Chiang Mai, the daytime dusty, boarded-up streets would transform into bars blasting American music, filled with colored lights, restaurants serving burgers, hookers everywhere. Whole nightlife businesses materialized for tourists and expats from boarded-up storefronts, like a strange butterfly coming out of its chrysalis. This wasn’t my life, but it was interesting to pass through it, and have the occasional conversation with a fellow moonlit exile.
Despite my best efforts, I relapsed and landed in rehab a second time, but this time for a 4-month stay in a much nicer program in Florida. The grounds of the facility were dotted with huge oaks draped in Spanish moss. It looked enchanted during the day and haunted at night. There I woke up pretty early most days and stayed up late most nights too. I was probably surviving on 3-5 hours of sleep a night, with the occasional nap in the afternoon. Those nights were spent with my roommate Addison. He was a night owl, and would sleep until late in the morning. We’d spend all night talking and smoking cigarettes until finally crashing around 4:00. There was nothing else to do at night except talk; we were surrounded by snakes and alligators and miles and miles of swampy forest. I’d wake up at 7:00, walk the stone labyrinth there in quiet meditation, then fetch breakfast for Addison and myself. It was there I started to fall in love with the morning.
I became a morning person for real when our kids were born a few years later. There’s no alarm clock like your child’s cry, and by the time we get the kids to bed, I’m exhausted myself. That’s when waking up early finally clicked for me: I could get back that time to myself. My peaceful mornings now consist of coffee, meditation, and creativity. Simon, my 4-year-old son, is up by 7:00 AM pretty regularly now, so I don’t have as much time as I once did, but I still get a little bit to myself in the mornings before the day’s responsibilities start to call to me.