Good morning, seasonably challenged, and welcome to group.

You may notice that the nice orderlies have loosened the knots on your restraint jackets. As part of your caring and compassionate support team, we want you to be comfortable and free to express yourselves.

We just don’t want you to hurt us.

If we were allowed windows in this place of refuge, you’d see that it’s dark outside. Just after 3 p.m., and night is falling. It feels like nuclear winter.

We know you only rolled out of bed an hour ago and pretty much missed all of daylight. Again. This is why you’re here, isn’t it?

You’re depressed and tired. The little aggravations in your lives seem suddenly huge and unconquerable. You have trouble focusing, trouble sleeping, trouble shuffling through your day. Your problems are compounded by all the happy people, so bright-eyed and joyous they seem to glow.

Bastards.

They are up before 6 a.m. and at the gym by 7. They eat breakfast in sunlit nooks and splash around in daylight as though it isn’t a precious commodity. Their skin has a healthy hue, and they never seem to tire. When night falls, they have supper with the family, boil water for tea and then climb into beds where they fall asleep at once.

They are freaks to you and me. Freaks who manage their lives in accordance to the sun as though it is a simple thing. Freaks who never gasp and claw at the night in an irrational bid for ultraviolet sustenance.

We’re not like them. That’s why we’re here, our belts and shoelaces taken away, writing everything with nonlethal crayons. We’re here because somewhere on the dark side of Labor Day, our habits began to betray us.

We stay up late and sleep until noon. Out of bed, we dawdle at the computer or before the television. By the time our last yawns have departed, so has the sun. Step outside and the last shadows of the day are being eaten by encroaching night.

Maybe we wouldn’t be in such horrible shape if the future wasn’t so grim. We try counting the days until a time when the sun comes early and stays late and the math overwhelms us. December, January, February, March …

In horror, we realize that if all men have monsters inside of them (which they do), then ours might crawl into being this time of year, when we are weak and desperate and dazed by darkness. We suddenly wonder if we could become one of those guys who tugs on a cheap ski mask and knocks over the corner pharmacy. Or if we might suddenly find ourselves yelling at trees in the park or wearing tinfoil hats to thwart a cosmic conspiracy.

The most terrible things seem possible when you and the sun are strangers. A small drinking habit becomes a big one. You find that you’re guzzling cough syrup long after the flu has gone. Maybe you like the smell of oven cleaner and magic markers a little more than you should.

What can you say? The desperation for sunlight is a little like drowning. You’re just not thinking right. You’re not yourself on this long day’s journey into blech.

And so you endeavor to get up earlier in the day. Have some tea and get some exercise. But by the second day, those lofty plans are dashed. Because you haven’t been to bed before midnight since you wore feety pajamas. Good intentions won’t put you to sleep any more than taking inventory of sheep. So you toss and you turn and you fume. Eventually, you kick the blankets off in frustration and realize that you are screwed on both ends of the clock. If it weren’t for the fine lineup on Nick-at-Nite, you might just quit the whole damn effort.

Fortunately, there’s the group. Just when you think you’re afloat alone in a bleak and starless cosmos, you find others who are similarly afflicted. Yings to your restless yang.

“My wife,” says one pale and angry man. “She tells me I should go to bed after Fringe. That’s 10 o’clock, for chrissakes. What am I, 5?”

“I tried Melatonin,” offers a skittish man at the back. “All it did was make me pee a lot.”

“I got so desperate, I tried napping in the home lighting section at Sears. I’m not allowed at Sears anymore.”

“The tall orderly is kind of cute, don’t you think? I think he’s kind of cute.”

And while like minds can’t brighten the landscape or warm your skin, they do provide something to do when you’re not weeping.

So, before the burly men in white coats send us to our rooms again, I’ll offer up one glimmer of hope. It’s a feeble glimmer — nothing like the blaze of our stingy parent star — but it’s something.

In one week minus a day, the winter solstice is upon us. The northern half of the planet begins to nod back toward the sun and the march toward longer days has begun. It’s a slow march, I’ll grant you. But it’s either embrace the seconds-longer days, or give up and go to Jamaica.

And if we could afford to do that, would we be sitting here in restraint coats and paper slippers, writing all of this in crayon?

I don’t think so. Now shut up, would you? George Lopez is on Nick-at-Nite.