If you happen to rise at 3:00 am and it’s not just to go the bathroom and go back to bed, you experience the world in an alternate universe kind of way. Your take is so much different now. What was gospel at 7:00 pm last night now seems like bloviation and silliness and you start to wonder if there isn’t some type of universal conspiracy going on. Where’s the punchline, here?

When the world is yet asleep, you assess the planet in a voyeuristic trance before your mind has a chance to percolate in its normal, rote manner. You are in bleary eyed amusement and wonder. I have been doing this all my life, because when you grow up in a family of twelve, you leave nothing to chance. If you want to eat, use the bathroom or capture the ironing board, you better be up early.

As a battle hardened entrepreneur, (that term is getting so old, isn’t it?) I rise every day with a live, or die by my own hand motivation, an eat or starve, think of something, make a decision, call the shots attitude. There is no lounge chair fade into the sunset, pass the margaritas Martha, ending for me.

I’m in the coliseum and the gates are locked. I am a prisoner of my own device. It’s by design and it has to work. It simply has to. This gives me a General Patton mindset. Prisoners? No thanks.

Which is why, when I get my daily briefing from the previous night’s news, I’m looking through a different set of glasses when the gotchas, the silliness and all the political red meat starts getting waved around. This where my humor and pathos get tested.

In order to win today politically, some one has to lose. Not just lose but be exposed as the fraud they always were and banished from the world stage as a loser. Opposition research kicks in on both sides and the smearing begins. Everyone goes at the carcass with relish. “Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?”

What I find offensive is the liberal notion that everyone in this country is “entitled” to a piece of the American Dream, which by the way, is a marketing slogan dreamed up by Fannie Mae just after WWII, and that life is designed to be fair in every way. Woe is you if you are chewing on that notion.

But that doesn’t stop politicians from slapping you upside the head with your God given right to a good job, good pay and a shot at a nice retirement in Boca Raton. That story is getting old. Fast. Ask any Syrian rebel.

So, yeah, call me a cynical, hard core, put up or shut up, pessimistic son of a bitch, but I ain’t going for any of that baloney those opportunistic bottom feeders are waving at me. When the music stops, and it will, I plan on keeping my chair.

We’re getting reality served up cold and it will pounce on anything that it thinks is prey. Like the antelope, your life depends on your ability to keep moving and stay two steps ahead of whatever is trying to eat you.

So when some disingenuous opportunist tells you to fight for your rights, do it. But not at the voting booth, you will be mightily disappointed.

It’s 3:00 am in America. That means you have a four hour head start on the dreamers who think life makes personal deliveries.

Think. Create. Survive, are your only options. Your head is more than a hat rack, don’t lose it.

Welcome to the coliseum.