drinking pepsi at 7 a.m. >> by eddie elmer >> *spark-online issue eighteen

I have a bad habit. I am addicted to Pepsi. I even drink the gunk for breakfast. Of course, like many addicts of assorted substances, I've enjoyed the bliss that comes only with the ardent denial of my sorry condition.

So bad has it been that it wasn't until a bus ride downtown a few days ago, when a fellow passenger stared at me in disgust and asked why I was happily guzzling Pepsi at seven in the morning, that I finally confronted my demons and asked why I was not imbibing coffee or orange juice or something more "suitable" for so early in the day.

But I also had to ask why my fellow passenger found my behaviour so remarkable that he risked the taboo of talking to a stranger on the bus. Why did he care? And indeed, why did I care that he cared? Why was the timing of my pathetic, yet otherwise innocent, behaviour so striking?

It's situations like this that give me the ripe opportunity to appreciate just how much of our daily lives are still determined by artificial, culture-bound time constraints--the expectation that certain things are to happen only at certain times of the day.

The neurotic expectation has become deeply ingrained in our psyche, particularly because it has been devoutly in the service of the "business day." Although the new economy has certainly spawned creative variations of it, it's still as insidious a rhythm as its natural counterpart: the 24-hour cycle of day and night.

Let's consider a typical "weekday." Why is it that the station manager at K-ROCK radio feels that whenever I wake up, I need invariably to be greeted by Jim-Bob Johnnie and his gruff, hillbilly voice reminding me at 140 decibels that a wiener truck has overturned on the #5 freeway and backed up traffic for miles?

Why is it expected that I then involuntarily subject myself to a cold shower--which Mother Nature could never have thought healthy for any normal virile man--when I could just as easily have the same shower in the evening? Why must I take a coffee break at 10 a.m. and eat lunch at noon, when I could nibble my salami sandwich at two or three in the afternoon while watching "General Hospital" on my little portable TV?

Why must I evacuate my workstation precisely when Olga, our cleaning lady, comes in with her Hoover and that cassette player spewing those endless Bobby Vinton tracks? Why does my stomach automatically growl and my mouth salivate when Dan Rather comes on for the evening news? Indeed, why do I watch the evening news with Dan Rather when I could be watching the Playboy Channel?

I wonder just how much I have unwittingly allowed myself to internalise these seemingly non-negotiable expectations. Sometimes I feel like one of Pavlov's dogs. In fact, I often wonder how easy it would be to force me on my kitchen floor and feast on Kibbles 'n Bits at precisely the same time Sparky does.

I wonder if Sparky is as aware of all the subtle little indicators that tell me my day should soon come to an end--like when I see Vanna turning letters. Why is it only seven in the evening and I'm already pulling out my daybook and reviewing the next day's activities, which, incidentally, had to be completely rescheduled earlier today because the office is going to be closed Thursday for carpet cleaning?

Why is the highlight of my evening taking out the trash, clipping my toenails, and drinking a litre of Metamucil so I stay happily regular for the next 24 hours? And why do I somehow not feel regular?

All this, which strikes many other cultures as patently bizarre, continues for five days of every week, and culminates in that quintessentially North-American experience, "the weekend"--the icon of which is that frazzle-faced Joe decked out in a fishing hat, Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and rubber flippers, hamburger flipper in one hand, and a golf club in the other. The weekend is the time he's expected to cut loose and "live the good life"--unfortunately, even when he doesn't want to.

Perhaps this is why so many of us have betrayed our biology and become nocturnal. Perhaps we can consider these chronologically appropriate expectations as memes of sorts, the social equivalents of genetic traits. We can push our increasingly nocturnal ways to introduce precisely the evolutionary deviation that will topple this mechanical existence and return us to life more akin to that of our happier ancestors in the jungle.

The night is an ideal vehicle for this. Aside from Susan Power's squealing and the kitchen faucet that always starts dripping just after you've fallen asleep, the night is fairly devoid of chronological markers. Flashing motel signs, the McDonald's arches, train whistles, chirping crickets. You see and hear them randomly: midnight, two a.m., three a.m., five a.m.

You co-exist with these sights and sounds for 12 hours while you and your actions are invisible to the world; while you gleefully vacuum your house and balance your chequebook in the nude; while you incubate your best ideas and produce your most creative works; while you finally lose yourself in whatever you do precisely because you're not expected to do so.

Perhaps part of this helps account for the allure of sleep when we're depressed--a retreat into a liquid, free-flowing, timeless state devoid of the outside's neurotic expectations--or the allure of an intricately wired world where time moves far too quickly even to be perceived. Perhaps this is why I've often been labeled a vampire--a Pepsi-guzzling one at that. (I even keep my curtains drawn during the day.)

But while the daytime world is busy toiling away, ostensibly in the search for "better living," night dwellers and others are quietly turning the tide. My drinking Pepsi at seven in the morning and repulsing everyone on the bus is but my small contribution to their search for a different kind of better living.

I think next week I'll actually drink Dr. Pepper on the bus downtown, this time at six in the morning, and see if I can shake things up a little more. The pop's on me if you'll join me.

Eddy Elmer likes pop!