Here I am again: I woke up again this morning. And, once again, I ran through all my available choices. Once more, I found no basic improvement in the human condition -- nothing astonishing had happened while I slept, no new options had evolved or hatched or arrived in flying saucers, or tunneled up from the deeps. No thoroughly new way of existing had been birthed, fizzing and crackling into existence from a wormhole's termination point on the surface of the planet nearest my thoroughly beat-up and timeworn footwear.
No, here I was able to again discover life at its simplest: There was the staying-in-the-rack option, or there was the up-and-at-'em angle. While there were no new lifeform alternatives presented overnight -- none that I could detect, at any rate -- at least both of the standard choices were still available. I wake up slow and groggy these days, but I glommed onto that much, sure enough.
Foolishly, I once more pressed the rise-and-shine selection into service. Personally, I blame my bladder for routinely holding me hostage to this narrowest possible range of wake-up choices. Once more, my body was holding me hostage to its demands -- and it would not be the last time in the day, or in this life, that it would cruelly limit my preferences.
After a brief skirmish with initially blurry night vision trying to find a compromise with light, and with a darkened area of the deck, and with a large black-and brown dog stretched out on that same surface, and with the imperatives of gravity, the first order of the day was eventually checked off the list.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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