I hate mornings. I wake up angry at the world. Having to get up early has been an injustice ever since I was a teenager. I know getting up at 6:00 AM every morning is better for me, but don’t tell me that at 6:30 AM. I will tell you to fuck off and die, and likely mean it. The struggle with the morning is a real one for me each day, but I take it by the horns willingly, knowing that this is part of my legacy programming that I can’t quite seem to shake, and once the day gets going I will be fine.
I get up each morning, use the bathroom, turn on the tea kettle, and then sit in my chair or lay on the couch. Sometimes I stare at my amazing view and watch New York wake up, and sometimes I lay on the couch thinking or scrolling on my cell phone. After we drink our tea, we head to Central Park to do our off leash loop around the park, eventually making our way back home to get ready for the day. The park walk is one true signal in my morning that I am making the right decision, and the anger I have is fabricated from earlier and less relevant period of time.
Once I get back from the park I make another cup of tea and get right to work. I will shower in a couple of hours after I get the motor running. I then sit in the driveway of my professional existence with the motor running to get the engine warm enough that I can drive out of the driveway and contribute something meaningful to the world. Sometimes I can pull it off after just a couple minutes of idling, sometimes I have to just sit there for an hour or more before I figure out how I am going to say three words in the opener of a blog post, or what the value in a key / value pair will be for some artifact I am publishing.
Getting started in the morning is hard. However, I can now do it without sleeping until 11:00 AM. I can now do it without opening my mouth and saying something mean and shitty. I can sometimes do it though crafting of an interesting post on some seemingly random topic that nobody has thought of before. Most of all I can do it reliably, day after day. And that I am still here doing it. The struggle hasn’t diminished in 40 years, but I keep doing it, and I keep coming out of the other end of the morning and work my ass off using my storytelling chainsaw, bringing in 1-2 cords of API blah blah blah firewood each day to keep the fire lit until the next morning comes.
