I notice on the right side of the screen that our national Terror Alert Level has risen from Bert to Ernie over the course of the last few days. All morning yesterday, KWMU kept telling me that part of the morning traffic was caused by the fact that the road to the airport was “closed.”

Hearing this through sleepy ears first thing in the morning does not scream the message, “Happy birthday, baby Jesus.”

In fact, NPR’s Morning Edition is a pretty terrifying way to wake up in general. For whatever reason, my alarm is timed to perfectly catch the top of the hour just as it’s starting, so every day begins with jaunty theme music and the worst thing I’m going to hear all day. Furthermore, the broadcast journalist who gently nudges me out of bed every morning is, like myself, a devotee of the run-on sentence, so that the first thing that imprints on my mind every day is, “Good morning two U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad today, with their limbs flying willy-nilly it is three minutes past the hour.”

And it’s always the casualty report, too. My father has often talked to me about growing up in the sixties, and each time he mentions how surreal it was to shave every morning while KMOX listed off the daily casualties. Turns out it still is.

This is a few degrees off from the 21st century I envisioned for myself. How ’bout you?