Meditations on Media: Get Up In The Morning, But Only If You Have A Reason

Whenever I'm in the mood for a thoughtful but honest interrogation of what it means to have a soul, I always go on over to my hard-hitting friends at The Huffington Post. They're all about gettin' down to the bottom of that whole human condition thing. Particularly enlightening is their "Healthy Living" page, which is without a doubt the internet's top destination for those of use who are interested in navigating the vapidity of average-everydayness. In an article titled "What's Your Reason for Waking Up in the Morning?", HuffPo pointedly asks its readers to share with the world their "number one reason for getting up in the morning." An assortment of delightful answers followed in suit, and it's worth taking a moment to try and psychoanalyze some authors.

"To wrap my arms around my amazing children!"- Melanie Gasque Wynkoop

• Melanie is clearly living vicariously through her children. Her morning embraces, which no doubt imbue her children with toxic feelings of noxious resentment, are clearly attempts to physiologically induce the meaningful human interactions that were deceitfully promised to her through the American dream and its constituent pathology, the hetero-normative family unit. When Melanie hugs her children, her grinning face is little more than a facade for an unrelenting loneliness, the constant awareness of her life's suffocating mountain of disappointments, primal anxieties regarding the inevitability of death, and the eternally returning mania that concerns itself exclusively with the cackling jeers of the shapeless, formless, motionless absence that is nothingness.

"Because I am alive and there is something new to be explored, learned, observed in the day to start." - Nosheen Khawar

• Even though Nosheen claims her curiosities and desires to explore motivate her morning wake, Nosheen is deluding herself into thinking that she likes to "roll with the punches" of life, so to speak. Such a psychologically-induced fiction is, in fact, evidenced by Nosheen's very first reason for getting up in the morning - "Because I am alive." Obviously, Nosheen needs to reassure herself daily that she is indeed alive - that her nightly sleep was not the dreamless one of death - that she is breathing and feeling - and that she successfully conquered another nightly battle with the daemons of her unconscious mind. Only then can Nosheen start to calm herself down, encounter herself as an embodied subject, and rediscover her ability to make her extremities move in concert with her own will. But by then, it is time to go to bed again. 

"To see what happens today." - Corey Baxter

• Corey put a lot of thought into this response. He pondered long and hard about what to write down, and ultimately, Corey decided to be honest - he gets out of bed to see what's up with the world, an answer that Corey believed was capable of conveying how awesomely profound and simple he can be when he exerts all of the faculties of his mind. But what Corey mistakes for profound simplicity is in reality just Corey's inability to think...at all...and his inability to think of a reason to get out of bed beyond "I wanna see what the fuck the world is gonna do with me while I'm in it today" is case in point why Corey has no friends. You see, Corey's mind is tremendously dull, as is made clear by his decision to post anything at all, and everyday before he gets out of bed, his uncanny ability to just fucking constantly fail and fall into a steeping pile of his intellectual inadequacies gets the better of him.

"For my wife and five kids; I DON'T want to be an example of laziness." - Ian Bradley

• Ian's life is rough. He has a wife, five kids, and he's definitely the family's only income-generator (sorry, honey, but capitalism doesn't consider all your hard work 'labor'). Ian likes to think that if he's lazy, he'll set a bad example for his kids. Ian likes to think that his 9 to 5 job and diligent work ethic are part and parcel of good fatherhood. But in reality, laziness is impossible for Ian. If Ian ever takes even just a ten minute afternoon nap, Ian's fragile, house of cards world will come crashing down on him. His family will starve, his home will go into foreclosure, and Capital One will repossess his masculinity. In short, an assemblage of breached obligations, shame, and disgrace will force him into his garage and persuade him to sit in his car with the windows open while carbon monoxide permeates his bloodstream. Ian can't not get up in the morning. Ian is fucking trapped. 

And that concludes this installment of meditations on media. Hopefully you all have better reasons for getting up in the morning than these poor saps.

-D$