What I do starting at three in the morning

Saturday 5/10/25

I don't do this every day starting at three in the morning, but some variation of it.

I awoke at 2:50 this morning to begin my day. I had been listening to--while I was sleeping--the Carleton Hobbs/Norman Shelley BBC adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. The Valley of Fear was playing when I woke up.

I checked the basketball and hockey playoffs scores and read through the Red Sox box score.

I then thought about this quote from Bill Evans once more, because it is correct and few people have understood this. You can swap in writing or fiction for music.

"Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that's universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it... enrichment, that's the function of music."

I changed the title of a story yesterday, and thought about the new one again. Not to try and judge it. But because I got it right.

I had several texts on my phone from someone from yesterday. I decided to text them back now. They never hear their phone when they are asleep, but it turns out they were up at three thirty in the morning. We spoke--as in, texted. I will not put up their side of the conversation here, as that wouldn't be appropriate, but I'll include mine, because I think it's helpful, even being divorced from its original context.

You have to realize how things are for people. Especially right now. You can't keep singling yourself out.

It's defeatist, but also distorting.

You are. Trust me. You want to get better? You have to start realizing things. That's the way forward.

Your attitude, your stress, worries, have put scales over your eyes.

You complain, blame. You don't see. You don't assess accurately. You don't help yourself.

Everything starts with acceptance--everything productive and healthy. You don't accept. Which makes it worse. But much of it is of your own making. Which isn't to say you don't have things to deal with. But they're not that different. They're not unique.

There are two possible attitudes and approaches.

One is, "What am I going to do about it?"

That's become less and less yours. There are many things you can do about yourself, and just about all of the items you listed above.

The other attitude is, "Woe is me."

Any day now could be my last day, and I don't say these things to you. Would you rather be in my position? Rhetorical question. Don't answer. Just try to be aware.

You have to be willing to humble yourself. And you're not. I don't just mean you. Everyone. You get angry, defiant, defensive. The thing about humility is it takes strength. Because we have to be able to say, "What if I've been wrong about all of this stuff?" or What if all of that was a waste of time, of my life, and it's like I'm starting over?" People would rather scream that they're in the right. When Molly left, I erased my conception of myself. I was wiling to believe I was anything. However bad, however not good. And that was important in me becoming the person I became, who is different this morning than the person I was yesterday.

You say the same things. You never change. You become less alive. You don't make the most of the agency you have. You're insecure. That's why you cling to false things. Because you sense that you couldn't handle not doing so. Then you're a man who calls the wrong number for seven days or whatever, and when you're made to know this, you blurt out, "I have a lot going on," like even your phone outsmarts you now. It doesn't do you any real good acting like this. And it makes it harder for you to do the most good for other people. That's what I got for now.

I did do that after Molly. It was all on the table for me. What I don't say in the above--because it wasn't relevant and me and this person have talked about this before--was that a lot of the things I was willing to consider with myself, turned out not to be true things. I certainly made my mistakes, but I was married to a truly bad and manipulative person.

But that process was still important to me. And it was part of a longer process. That was 2012. Another important part of the larger process was when I stopped drinking in 2016. Certain policies I adopted. And of course the stairs. Things in my work. Things I wrote that I could not have written before. All matters Zulu, which I think people think is a joke, and it kind of is in one way, but it's also something that has definite meaning for me, has come to mean something. A code. A way of being. A discipline. An embodiment of what is good, brave, and right.

Around the same time, I listened, as I do every day, for the first birdsong of the morning. I am up before the birds, and I like to hear them when they are up--because it's not many of them--before the sun.

I listened to some more of the second series of The Lovecraft Investigations.

I checked my email to see if something had come in eleventh hour about an op-ed I had written--on Hitchcock's Psycho--but as I expected, thee wasn't anything. Tomorrow I'll have two op-eds in major newspapers. No one has ever done that before--on the same day, I mean. I've done it quite a few times now, but I wanted to see if I could have three op-eds in three major newspapers on the same day. Because I am like that.

I downloaded assorted records of Schubert symphonies--some containing individual symphonies, another being a box set with all of them.

I listened to a Vini Reilly interview again from 1981, and then email it to several college professors I know, saying I would play this for writing students.

There aren't many things that are any good, that are being played anywhere or being done anywhere. And it depresses me, everyone is following each other, and there's not very much originality anymore...

I tried to find a copy of Primal Scream's Live in Japan online, because I don't know where my physical copy is and who knows when I will see it again. I may have a solution. I'm not sure yet.

I downloaded a lot of Lennie Tristano. Early albums, Mosaic box sets. Mosaic had sent me the most recent. There's another from 1997 and I found that.

I drank black tea for my heart.

I started doing my push-ups in the hallway.

I listened to the Durutti Column's "The Missing Boy" in a couple of different versions. I have been singing it for days now. Machinery in action. The same old order. And also the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" from Cleveland on 12/6/73--but just the beginning.