You know why the early bird gets the worm? Early risers are too groggy to realize what they're eating.
Getting up before dawn didn't do much for the health of the worm, either.
As the saying goes, the second mouse eats the cheese. Cheese makes far more sense than worms. And it's yours for sleeping in.
No, I'm not a morning person. How did you know?
When I was kid, Mom woke me about 16 times each morning for school. A good deal of those times, I already was out of bed. I nearly drowned in the shower at least three times a week and almost suffocated in my oatmeal twice a week.
Some days, my body was in class chewing on worms, but my brain stayed in bed with the mice, dreaming of cheese.
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I frustrated my father, a certified morning person. Every vacation, Dad wanted to be on the road by 5 a.m. He carried me to the car in my pajamas and dumped me in.
A couple years back, I took a road trip with my parents, camping out at their house the night before. I expected to wake up in the car 150 miles from home, like usual.
''Forget it. You weigh more than I do,'' Dad snarled at 5 a.m.
People who get up early enough to eat worms are not very pleasant to us cheeseheads.
Many years ago, English poet Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton opined, ''I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.''
Oh, put a sock in it!
As author Joanne Sherman said, ''I have a 'carpe diem' mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning, the words do not make me want to seize the day. They make me want to slap a dead poet.''
And the great philosopher Garfield the cat - and Jim Davis - put it, ''If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters.''
I am not alone in my reluctance to witness a sunrise.
Robert Brault calculated, ''There would be a lot more optimists if it weren't for the rise-and-shine requirement.''
William Feather said, ''Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.''
Even the Bible states ''A loud and cheerful greeting early in the morning will be taken as a curse!'' (Proverbs 27:14, NLT)
Yes, yes, I know, the worm chewers trot out lots of evidence to justify their ridiculously early rising - freshness, productivity, clear-headedness, the ability to contemplate.
Richard Whately said, ''Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it.''
Marcus Aurelius wrote, ''When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.''
How can one think clearly with all that early bird chirping going on? Let's flip the switch on this bird-to-human translator machine to hear what the birds are chirping: ''Blech! I thought it was last night's spaghetti. I've just got to get more sleep.''
As Benjamin Franklin meant to say, ''Early to bed, early to rise makes people suspicious.''
So sleep in. It's a lot easier to face the day when your mouth isn't full of the taste of early worm.
----- Explain to Cole what ''sloth'' means at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.