Aubade 7
I am breaking spring and have finally decided, like many others, the morning is the capital time to write:
1. Mind is wire-scrubbed clean or the opposite, LSD-like dreams. (I recently awoke at the foot of the bed, on the floor, wrapped in residue of twisted thoughts/a past nursing school instructor squawking me down/sweaty blankets). Both states of mind are useful.
2. Stomach is empty. A full stomach makes for naps, not crisp writing. Breakfast is bullshit, as we know.
3. 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine nudges the nerve impulses with a knife and goes Kelly Clarkson on your dopamine. 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine is caffeine. Coffee is morning. Like with running or mint-thinning or higher math, caffeine can assist you.
11. Unless you are Marguerite Duras, you are probably not drunk (though possibly hungover, an odd state not always detrimental to writing).
4. Birds cough. Much better chance of seeing coyotes.
4. Due to tidal friction, nutation, and polar motion, the internet doesn’t work well in the early morning hours. This is a good thing.
1. You will have a slight after-burn writing buzz after writing. If things went well, you might even float this buzz into calling your parents or digging a proper hole or encouraging a Canadian, etc.
2. You get “it” done and are done and can now go fishing on the Pilar of your days, satisfied. Like exercise, often better had done than doing (though I’m not in that camp).
4. The blue energy of morning is weird. Good.
6. Less water, less bloat, less gravity. You are beginning the upward arch of awake. There is potential, a finicky but good thing. Later, potential is like the last piece of pizza. The glow congealed. You begin the descending arch into the arms of Morpheus.
7. People might leave you alone. But they might not. Try to make a life where, in the early morning, people will leave you alone. This is difficult. It’s not my life, but it is this week: I am breaking spring.
Tags: awake!, Hemingway, Velveeta mornings, Worms rent earth
sean this is nice. maybe it is breakfast that has been holding me back from morning writing. or not drinking coffee. i teach in the mornings and write in the afternoons, but i don’t have good reasons for it.
The great problem with working in the morning is that morning is so close to ‘late at night’, a time when many desirable things that might happen at any time are likely to begin happening or to continue to happen.
U don’t drink coffee (or caffeine)? That is unique.
My mornings are made for purging the evils of the night before. Imagine that part of the music video for Tool’s “Stinkfist” where the shoulder cheese grows off the dude. It’s a lot like that.
I normally have to go out somewhere to get writing done. I can’t do it where I live because I associate being out of the home with getting shit done. I also try to write all first drafts by hand so I can keep my laptop as far away from me as possible.
Also, ideally, I’m on Adderall, and, also, on the same note, can anyone in the Chicagoland area hook me up with some Adderall.
http://frsh.in/5c
Empty stomach is key, agreed. Caffeine is best way to wake up into the work in the a.m.
Oh man, you’re so right.
I had a good run of things the other day and then telephoned my mother just to say what’s up. She said, is there something wrong? I said, can’t a son just call his mother to say what’s up? She said, you haven’t done this in I don’t know how many years; what’s wrong? I then realized I wanted to share the after-burn writing buzz with someone and was surprised myself that I had called my mother. We then fought about how nothing was wrong to make something wrong. NEVER TRUST THE AFTER-BURN FLOAT!
Writing hung over is fine, as is writing drunk so long as you are not a sloppy drunk. This last bastard of a book i have been working on for the past year has been written mostly in the morning, sometimes on painkillers whenever I can work a Dr’s rx, sometimes in that ultrasensitive state you get into after burning through 100 vicodin es in a two 1/2 week period (waking up dry mouth, wracked with dread and stomach cramps, but remembering that this is literally nothing compared to an honest to god opiate withdrawal), some sections were written on legal thai psychoactive herb kratom which is like caffeine except with mild euphoria and tastes like a donkeys ass, sections were written in an irish bar in queens called peggy’s which always has ex-cops talking shop at the bar and classic rock playing on the jukebox (many sections were written to an accidental soundtrack of manfred manns earth band, ‘blinded by the light’, jesus) and a lot of the rewrites were written on other substances and combinations of substances including (but not limited to) amphetamines, weed, booze, albums by the jesus and mary chain, david bowie, iggy pop, scott walker (not the republican scott walker, the cool one who was once described as frank sinatra meets jean paul satre).
Which is all a very long way of saying that anytime’s alright to write, but saturday night is best for fighting.
vipshopper.us
“A novel is a mirror carried down a highway.” Stendhal