It looks as though we’ve found a bit of breathing space. Chores are more or less caught up, the home front is in confident hands (i.e., not mine), we’re only two days to the weekend. Yee-haw.

One reason I’ve been a bit discombobulated of late is the extreme schedule adjustment since Ann Arbor. I now arrive at work at 5 a.m., an hour so early it generally needs an extra adjective — “ungodly,” say. But little by little, it’s growing on me, sort of. The 3:55 alarm is always a shock, but as early birds all over the world know, there’s some pleasure in being one of the few, the proud, the ambulatory-before-dawn.

My drive to work is over in a jif with so little traffic, but there’s lots to like about it while it lasts. The just-getting-home people, out wandering Creighton Avenue. The members-only Black Pistons MC storefront, frequently still open, with a sturdy bearded biker or two shooting pool until last-man-standing. The sleepy faces in Tom’s Donuts. The open-all-night Taco Bell, downtown. And, of course, “Coast to Coast.”

It’s been a good while since I was up in the wee hours doing much other than nursing a baby or having insomnia, and neither activity is well-suited to radio listening. So I missed the whole Art Bell era, when “Coast to Coast” put itself on the map, with its all-night collection of ghost-hunters, paranormal spoon-benders and, of course, aliens.

An alien called the other morning on my drive in. He said he was a “visitor,” or a “newcomer” or an “ambassador” or something like that, the gist being: He was just now realizing his human form was an illusion, or maybe closer to a shell. He was a one-man sleeper cell for an alien force, and he was awakening to his mission, although it wasn’t entirely clear yet.

“How does one know if you’re one of these?” the host queried.

“You feel estranged from your family,” the man said, among other things. Well, that’s helpful.

The best thing about a 5 a.m. factory whistle? Quittin’ time comes at 1 p.m. One of these days I’ll figure out the magical bedtime that enables me to get through the rest of the day without needing a little nap. It is summer, after all; I should be working on my tan.

A few things you might enjoy reading:

Gwynne Dyer speaks the uncomfortable truth about our involvement in Iraq:

So once more, with feeling: the 9/11 attacks were not aimed at American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or another. They were an operation that was broadly intended to raise the profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world, but they had the further quite specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim countries.

The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the U.S. to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their stalled revolutions off the ground.

And my friend Jones speaks the somewhat less compelling truth about Bob Knight. If anyone still cares, that is:

Let me tell you something. Knight would never allow anyone to see it. But he’s hurting right now.

And, for a competitor such as Knight, this is indigestible. It’s the cruelest of punishments.

Irrelevance! Who doesn’t know that feeling? Sometimes, anyway.

More tomorrow.