Those mornings when the alarm goes off and you do not want to get out of bed, even though it is not all that cold and getting up is not going to cause you a lot of physical suffering, but somehow you feel unenthused and unprepared for the day, thinking perhaps that you do not have the intelligence or energy to make a success of the day, even though the sun is shining and your calendar is relatively clear of any real demands on your intellect.

My new thinking for those mornings is this: put porn on the TV and turn up the volume. Instead of having NPR for your background noise (and really, what does NPR do except make you feel ill informed and inadequate in the face of the challenges confronting the world?), let the hokey music and artificial enthusiasm of the porn soundtrack carry you into your day.

In the interests of science, I tested my theory this morning. It had several key advantages over any other morning background accompaniment:

1) It is hard not to get a lift from being surrounded by so much enthusiasm. Even if they do not mean it, I don?t think your subconscious is clever enough to distinguish between legitimate ecstasy and ecstasy for money. You just find yourself getting happier.

1a) I think a corollary of the above is that with the tiniest amount of imagination, you could imagine that you had an audience of two (or three, or a room full of) people cheering you on every step you take. Good job brushing your teeth, Scott! ?Oh yeah! Fuck yeah! Right there, baby!? Is this shirt a good choice for today? ?Yes! YES! YES!!!? It is like having a fan base for even your most mundane morning chores.

2) How can you not enjoy the company of people engaged in the most basic of physical acts? These are pretty people. They are not starving in Ethiopia, they?re not losing their retirement savings, and they are not living in fear of the next terrorist attack. They are having sex. Lots of sex in every position which can be managed while still providing an unobstructed camera angle of the intersecting genitalia. And should we not celebrate life and its pleasures rather than the losses?

3) Porn people make you feel smarter. Even at your groggiest worst in the morning, you are still a better actor than the porn girls and boys. And compared to their obscenity-riddled twelve-word porn vocabulary, you are a Dickinson or Shakespeare. Unlike NPR, porn never sends you scrambling to an atlas or dictionary. Porn gives you a warm glow of incontestable superiority.

Yup. ScottMcJ. An opinion to offend everybody.

Here?s another: I was outside reading for a few minutes at lunch today, when this burly black guy without no shirt on wandered into my peripheral vision and started doing push-ups. Right there in the middle of the square at Westlake Park. While smoking a cigarette.

I wanted to ask him, ?hey, you?re quite clearly a strong and in-shape guy who cares about his body, and I am not even contesting that you could kick my ass. But how do you reconcile the amazing irony of smoking while doing push-ups??

But then some girl, much cuter than me, approached him and they did not appear to have a very congenial conversation, so I left him alone, not wanting to be the second person in five minutes to pester him.

Having opened my imaginary conversation with him, however, I was all curious about him. Does he find being buff nets him more or less racism than his weaker black friends? And how about the shaved head thing? What is the ideal hair density for minimizing racial harassment? Presumably a huge afro is not so great, either.

I went back into work with the very unworthy thought that if you could have his deep, deep tan without having to carry the stigma of being black, who would not choose that? I would be all over it in a heartbeat, rather than go through life always being the white-pink pasty smudge in photographs.