2026-01-29 Journal Entry

Another day, another dollar. Blah de blah blah. What’s happening, not much really, just getting out of bed and trying to feel into the strange quarters of my brain. This morning is an experment in caffeinelessness, as I have nothing in the fridge riht now. I’ll need to pop in to the supermercado on my usual morning walk, but normally (some may say “traditionally”) I have would be sitting here with a nice flavored Red Bull – I’ve been going with the pineapple vintage lately, as that’s what’s most available around here, though I sometimes get my lovely apricot variant too.

I find it strange that even after all these years of working full-time on a computer, I’m still quite bad at typing, that I mistype perhaps every other word somehow and constantly have to go back and redo it. It would likely be a good idea to really practice my accuracy, like a musician – to play it extremely slow and accurately, and then to gradually speed up the tempo until I get back to my old performance speed. I can still go quite fast with my mistaken typing, but I think it may even be a more pleasant experience to type more accurately, as I’m trying to do at this very moment. I don’t know if it’s slowing me down a ton, but it does feel a bit less frustrating to not be backtracking all the time. Perhaps it’s just a matter of attention, as things often are.

This morning I feel I have realatvely little to say. I slept deeply last night but woke up this morning feeling as if I still needed more, despite a solid nine hours of sleep. I did go on a run yesterday, and I think I realize right now the depths of cardiovascular insufficiency I’m currently in. My oura ring tells my my heart rate sits around 160 bpm the entire run, which seems quite high for what amounted to a pretty slow jog. I didn’t feel wildly out of breath or anything, but I could tell my heart was working a bit of overtime. That’s one of those things I really should be careful about. I think I’m active enough, but that’s a sign I’m not actually active enough. When I get back to Birmingham, it’ll be a bit easier to be in the routine I really want as far as exercise goes.

This one is just turning out to essentially be a diary entry. I could probably zoom out and reflect on it differently, reflect on my concern for health growing now that I’m nearly 30, something that younger me cared about but not with any real concern. In college I cared about running insofar as it was a thing that Haruki Murakami did and at the time I thought he was incredible (and he’s still an interesting man to me, I’m just less into his novels). I read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is a decent memoir. The only thing that really stuck with it from me was this idea that Murakami saw writing and solitude as some kind of poison that slowly took over the body and mind, and that you had to do something to counteract that poison, and for him that was running. I don’t know if that idea is bulletproof to me, as there are plenty of solitary writers who didn’t have some kind of brutal physical hobby as far as I know, but it also does make sense in that it pulls the attention down from the mind and the mental-self down into the body, into the earth, into the feet striking the ground and the wind against the skin and also to keeping the eyes up and seeing your surroundings. You are thrust out into the world (unless you perform the godless act of running on a treadmill, which should be strictly banned), something that I think a man like Murakami probably needs.

I don’t know, sometimes I feel like in mornings like these, Morning Pages don’t quite get me to anywehere particularly interesting. They do help me wake up, though, I’ll tell you that, though I’m still in a bit of a half-daze from my insufficient sleep, which perhaps will be conducive to writing. But we’ll find out shortly – I’m trying to not think too much and just get the words out of me.