2023-02-02 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Thursday 🗓 Date: February 2, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2023

gm. We’re here, wide awake this time. And it’s actually 5:40! It is indeed possible to wake up early and not feel like total shit, although I’m still waking up a bit. But anyways, I did it and that’s enough.

I don’t have anything stirring deep inside me to write about at the moment. I’m still just waking up from that kinda dusty fog that you have when you wake up. Maybe a touch of caffeine will help, let’s make some warm tea. I’m trying to kick my terrible habit of just chugging Yerba every morning. It’s like 200mg of caffeine directly into my veins every single day, and I can’t help but think that’s wildly unhealthy. Not to mention it’s enough sugar to put someone into a coma.

So here I sit with my little Earl Grey in my little mug, enough to get my day going. Between this and some coffee later in the morning, since I have the itch to go to Dolores Park Cafe later on, I think I’ll still hit my 200mg of caffeine anyways, but at least it’ll be spread over a few hours this time.

Caffeine is my new alcohol, I think. The more I attune to my body, the more I can see that it actually doesn’t make me feel great. It can somewhat give the illusion of helping, but I’m fairly certain I can that same little boost by just drinking a lot of water right when I wake up. I also think caffeine fucks with my sleep more than I like to admit. It’s not that I always have bad sleep, but my sleep feels inconsistent, and I think I’ve lulled myself into the notion that I’m basically numbed to caffeine and end up drinking it really late into the afternoon occasionally. It’s not nearly as bad as alcohol, I’ll admit, which I think was starting to legitimately damage by body in various ways, but it’s still less than ideal.

Speaking of alcohol, I’ve really shunned it more from my house too. I used to have that little bar cart that sat in my living room because I liked (and still do like!) the aesthetics of liquor bottles, their lovely labels and bottles describing a whole history of distilleries and cultures, but I also just felt like they made me look like an alcoholic lmao. I also just don’t really drink them any more, which is to say they just take up space. I’ve shoved them into various cupboards, but I also don’t really love that. There’s a ton I simply know I’ll never drink, so I might as well just get rid of them. I could see myself keeping around a bottle of whisky or whatever, but a few spirits are about all I think I’d really want.

Our fascination with caffeine and alcohol are a bit weird. Spirits can have a surprisingly nice taste in a cocktail, but most people drank them straight for forever, which sounds simply miserable when you consider how bad old cheap gin probably was, and coffee is similarly pretty unpleasant. Maybe I just hate coffee, I think that’s what it really is. Anyways, why drink those weak ass drinks when you could just take ayahuasca and have a really cool experience. But seriously though, the degree to which folks used to just be consistently drunk in the pre-Prohibition era is a little mind-boggling to me. Like the average working man was drunk ~most of the day, from what I can tell, and I simply cannot fathom that being enjoyable in the slightest. That must be numbest experience I can think of.

In my alcohol-shaming era, apparently. Drinking it isn’t inherently bad, but it is pretty not-fun unless you’re explicitly going out for that purpose. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a waste of time.

Ummmm what else to write about. I’m just in here chilling, letting my fingers keep going until I inevitably get distracted by something, although for now I’m just enjoying some lofi hip hop beats to write to and some earl grey to warm me up. Otherwise, it’s sorta life as usual, work is still a bit of a slog. I’ve been on run this week, which is kinda fun but also a bit of a drag. A lot of tiny tasks, but it feels nice in some way to do snacking work like that, especially because it’s things that we probably miss out on a lot but that are still really valuable.

I’m very much meandering today. I’m in my chilling era. Well, that’s not really true. I feel a little obsessive about this story at the moment actually, and I feel like I really want to devote a million hours to it, but I also am at this very moment very tired. I would like nothing more than to have a day off where I sit on the couch and read for a day, taking naps whenever I feel like it. But it’s time to power through at the moment.

There comes a time in every man’s morning pages when the caffeine starts to kick in and we kick things into overdrive. That moment is right now. My fingers are flying across the keyboard like I’m Lang Lang or something, I don’t know. Kicking it into overdrive right now is a bit funny because I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, so I’m quite literally writing by the seat of my pants. Well not literally at all in fact, but that’s the beauty of the English language: “literally” can mean “not literally” if you want it to. Words are a figment of our imagination, only there to point us towards the fact that all things are figments of our imagination, totally constructed by our mind. Words are a government conspiracy to keep us distracted from the real atrocities of our daily lives. Words are a conspiracy by Big Think to make us think more thoughts. Words are a conspiracy by publishing companies to sell more books.

See, this is the kind of content you get when you start just barfing out words. It’s lovely, it’s terrifying, exactly like the feeling of disillusion felt by the protagonist in my story. Well, not the lovely part, just the terrifying part.

What if birds really are a conspiracy by the government and they’re actually just drones. What’s crazy is that birds have existed for all of human history and we’ve described them as such, which leaves us with a few options: (1) that modern governments killed off all of the other non-robot birds to have only their robo-birds occupy the airspace, (2) that government-designed birds mix in seamlessly with real birds, or that (3) birds have always been government plots since the beginning of time, but that means that the ur-government behind it all is one with technology far beyond our years (since they had drones in 3000BC) and also exists beyond all historical notions of nation, state, and people. Now that’s a novel idea if I ever heard one. It would likely be the most insane novel of all time, to uncover the plot that birds actually aren’t real and have been recording history for thousands of years. The implications of that would be pretty difficult to tie together, I think. It would also be probably the worst-selling novel of all time, unless it were to become a cult-classic like Sharknado. That said, books don’t tend to be so-bad-they’re-funny kinds of cult classics, I don’t think.

Well folks, it’s been a delightful 45 minutes here writing with you. I accidentally wrote “righting” at first, but I don’t think we made anything more right this time around. Birds being drones, words being a conspiracy by book companies to make you buy more books; in fact, this is probably one of the worst Morning Pages I’ve ever written, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Well, I might trade it for the world. But I wouldn’t trade it for something small, like a jar of peanut butter or even a cool rock. I hope, dear Pages, that that shows just how much I love and respect you. You’re worth more than a jar of Peter Pan to me. I came here to drink tea and write my morning pages, and I’m almost at my 1500 words limit for the day. Good day, I love you, you’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning. (A few more words to reach the limit, okay love you buh-bye.)