• Four cups of espresso, four cigarettes, sitting in my back garden. Under a roof, because it’s England, and we can get hail in the height of summer.
• I don’t open Instagram in the morning any more. The new timeline system has fucked it all up for me. (Yes, yes, all-inclusive linear timelines are also an algorithmic choice blah blah nothing is real blah blah time is a flat circle blah blah fuck off.)
• News podcasts from BBC Today and The Economist while I struggle to focus my eyes and stare at the garden. Then skimming the top of Twitter, the Guardian, Foreign Policy.
• I live in DMs and emails now. (And one tiny Slack channel.) An acquaintance DM’d me yesterday to tell me they were going to “0 followers” on Twitter because the public internet is just freaky and stressy these days.
• There’s a podcast sent from a monastery in France, that records each day’s chants, and I often listen to that over the last espresso while I process the overnight email. Most of my days are insane, lately - writing and firing off a hundred emails and processing production material and spending an unusual amount of time on the phone. I protect my mornings to the death, now. I need to start the day slowly, and with the volume turned down. The top of the day can be peaceful, even while assimilating information. You just have to find the ways to turn the volume down on the world.
• And then, notebook in one hand and the phone in the other, I go for a walk.

READING: NOCILLA DREAM, Agustin Fernandez Mallo (UK) (US)