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Saturday ^ NOT Friday, 9-13-25

 

Fine! I’ll sit on the couch then. Give the cats a treat, my glorious presence.

And I’ll also pay a small tribute to this pen, if it holds up long enough for me to do so. A fine pen, the pilot G-2 .07. It has weathered my indifference and neglect, having spent its life in a pen-itentiary (ha) along with other similarly neglected tools and artifices of a bygone era – the Age of Ink.

The others, BICs mostly, and a few dehydrated Sharpies, did not merit extradition, as in, springing from the pen hoosegow. What they may or may not have brought to the table is incomparable, would have been less emotionally satisfying, and so I picked this one. This is your first assignment – don’t fuck it up!

Now, as this has to be a written, i.e., handwritten exercise, and as it has a few regulatory guiding principles, I will take up the allotted space and/or time, in a manner suitable to the task’s stated purpose:

 

The Morning Pages

Write three pages, pen and ink (and paper, duh) per day. Make no review thereof, but faithfully, daily fill three pages upon awakening, or as soon thereafter as is reasonably possible. Type font size may vary, but no obvious cheats, such as 72 point all caps. Spacing, likewise, is to be minimal, except where used to create a dramatic effect.

Like this:

I will get around to the stated purpose of the exercise, but first, a few more guidelines:

(1)   Always write in a location that is not my death chair recliner in the man cave. Any other chair but that.

(2)   Do this exercise before, and in place of, looking at any screens, i.e., TV, phone, computer. Window screens are OK.

I’m going to write this line to be thorough.

 

So, coming into the home stretch, what do I hope to accomplish, and how will I benefit from this exercise? Improving my penmanship will probably not be a result, as I seem to be in a hurry to get the words out before they find other places to roost. But the purpose I have, as my main goal, is to break with my habituated addiction to, and reliance upon, all things digital.

Social media, news media, political podcasts: these things have cluttered up my brain, given me short attention span-it is, and left me a zombified, unthinking drone. Worse, I feel the pull of radicalization, as the algorithm guides me surely down the path of some ideology or another. The horse is driving the buggy, not the driver, and I am feeling buggier and buggier by the day.

 

Something has to change, and it ain’t gonna come with the next reel or post or podcast, as well-intentioned as they may be. It is time for the rubber to meet the road, or the bare foot to touch the grass as it were.

 Hey – I did it!