Journal

This morning is coffee and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. This morning has been getting out of bed too late because I was reading Catherynne Valente’s The Bread We Eat in Dreams and falling in love with story after story, falling in love with each shiny little jewel of language that’s deployed.

This morning is porridge and a warm shower and a mild irritation about the fact that I have to shave. This morning is listening to Piss Factory, over and over.

This morning is thinking, well, two days to go, and realising that I still haven’t quite locked down the details for next week. This morning is an alert from the transit app letting me know all trains have been delayed.

This morning is missing Melbourne, just a little. This morning is looking forward to lunch. This morning is getting jealous at the friends who have wandered off to Adelaide this weekend, in order to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference. This morning is spent thinking about poetry for the first time in years, and digging through the bookshelves for some old anthologies.

This morning is squinting at story drafts and asking, so, where’s the money in this?, because I’ve been watching too many pro-wrestling shoot interviews and it’s affecting the way I work. This morning is realising that’s no bad thing, because it’s calling my attention to things that need fixing.

This morning is chewing over a whole bunch of frustration and anger and regret.

This morning is asking myself, well, what do we want to blog about today?, and realising the answer is everything. This morning is realising that answer is untenable and making a compromise instead. It’s not an unusual morning, apart from its comparative lack of dread about the coming day.

This morning ain’t so bad, really. It’s more or less what I want my mornings to be.

Back in December I read Patti Smith’s M Train, a book that starts with (and frequently returns  to) Smith’s daily ritual of heading to her local cafe for a coffee, toast, and a period of reflection where she writes in her notebook.

M Train gets sold as a memoir, but that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the experience. It’s a book about thinking, much of the time, and there’s an incredible serenity and ritual at work. A place and an action imbued with meaning through repetition. Just Kids is a memoir about Smith’s life up to a certain point. M Train is a memoir about Smith’s interests, thoughts, and habits.

I started going to my local cafe a lot, after reading M Train. Not because of the book, directly, but because I started to pay more attention to the habits in my life that brought me satisfaction. I started meeting a friend there for breakfast once a week. Occasionally I’d duck over ’cause my day needed a better cup of coffee than I’d do myself, and they were reliable on that front.

I liked their food. I liked their music. I liked their politics, which may be a strange thing to appreciate about your local cafe, but mine wears its political allegiance on its sleeve and its advertising, and the owners are frequently funny as hell when they’re expressing their opinions on Australia and its government.

It was a useful place to be, when I could not stand my apartment and the thoughts rattling around my head anymore. And somewhere along the line I became a regular. It’s a place I can go and drink coffee and think. Plan out my day, make notes about future projects. Occasionally sketch out the notes for a blog post, before I head home and fire up a computer and start writing for real.

Increasingly, I hit the point where my visits there are ritual. It’s incredibly comforting, and…well, serene.

In a year where there’s been considerable chaos in my life, it feels like I got this right.

Planning out my week in Melbourne Airport. This Friday’s entry gave me a moment if pause 

Even when you know it’s coming, it sneaks up on you.