Reclaiming the Morning Routine
The Best Part of Waking Up
It’s a funny thing, but I realized recently that I’m coming up on my ninth anniversary of getting my first piece published by the New York Times. I don’t usually celebrate writer milestones, but that one was a pretty big deal to me, getting to turn writing for The Paris Review for the first time into my first article for the Times. You have to read the piece yourself to get the gist of it, but basically I ended up at the coffee shop I used to work at the morning after celebrating a byline on the famous literary journal’s website, was feeling very high and mighty about my big moment, but was brought right back down to earth when a customer recognized me not because I was a writer, but because I used to be a barista. The point being, really, is that you can never leave the circle of baristas. If you spend long enough working in a place (or in my case, places) that takes coffee seriously, it rubs off on you both figuratively and literally. You will forever feel like a judge of what’s good and bad coffee and you might have a few scars from scolding hot water or you might find the side of your index finger is always a little bit chapped compared to the rest of your hand, the result of pushing espresso back and forth to smooth it out before you tamp it down. You carry the signs of the barista on you for the rest of your life.
And somewhere during my life as a barista, before pour-over was en vogue, I noticed a lot of coffee shops decided to sell their customers on buying a French press full of single origin beans instead of just buying a cup of drip. I was there for that, man. I was the barista who had to suggest to people, hey, maybe instead of spending three bucks on that large coffee for here you’d like to spend ten on a French press and just sit at your own leisure and read whatever intro to Marxism book you’ve got to impress the other NYU students with. The pitch was French press brought out the essence of the beans — or something like that. Then Blue Bottle started popping up, made waiting 10 minutes while somebody slowly poured hot water from a kettle cool, and suddenly that was what everybody wanted. The French press was relegated to something you found mostly in restaurants. It came with brunch or was offered up as an after dinner option.
All the while, we kept using the French press in our home. Emily and I have been living together for about a decade and our morning coffee has either come when I go out to get it, or we make it in the old press. We drink the coffee and then stare at the thing that made it for a few hours or so, dreading having to clean the grinds out and the mess it almost always makes. That, and I noticed the French press coffee doesn’t really do much for me. I need something that’s going to kick me in the ass. Taste is important, but it also has to be strong. Tasty and strong. That’s what I’m looking for in the morning. The best and most convenient way to get that, I reasoned, was to finally get a coffee maker.
Obviously given everything that I’ve told you, we took this decision pretty seriously. We looked at machine after machine, finally landing on the somewhat pricey OXO 9-Cup Coffee Maker, agreeing that we’d probably earn back the $200 price tag within a month or so given that I usually go buy a cup of coffee almost immediately after drinking from the French press. And now we have something in our kitchen that makes us nine cups of strong coffee, can be ready when I wake up and doesn’t make a huge mess after.
There’s a larger point to all this besides bragging that I have a new coffee maker. It’s that I’ve figured out a way to realign my morning routine a little more. It’s one step closer to something resembling normal to me. Before we got the coffee maker, I was stuck in a routine that didn’t really work that well for me. I had diverted far off the path from my pre-Covid mornings that involved waking up around 5:30 or 6, reading, walking my dog, exercising, meditating, eating a grapefruit and oatmeal, drinking a few glasses of water, then drinking the coffee from the French press, usually followed by a second coffee after. That was usually what I did before I started writing or working or anything like that. I had a system. It wasn’t a “life hack,” it was simply the routine I’d gotten myself into, a way to make myself feel mentally and physically healthy as the day got going. I’ve learned that more than any other part of the day, if my morning is chaotic, the rest of the day probably will be as well. So I made sure to make it as chill as possible.
The last nine months, on the other hand, I’ve been all over the place in the mornings. Sometimes waking up at 7, sitting around in my robe for 45 minutes, skipping my meditation sessions, not making breakfast and settling on a croissant or something when I’d go get that inevitable second coffee from the coffee shop. Working from home either made it easier not to have a routine or harder to keep one — I’m still not sure which it is. The point is, I realized I needed to get my mornings back. Push reset on things. And I did that the first time I programmed my new coffee maker to have a pot ready for me in the morning.
Igor Stravinsky’s Cadillac
I’m a big Ian Frazier fan. Have you read Travels in Siberia or Great Plains? Please do if you’re looking for something.
Frazier’s latest New Yorker piece, Rereading Lolita, is one of my favorite things he’s done for the magazine in some time. Part memoir, part history lesson, it focuses on his own childhood travels and reading Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel, but also features art and some interesting trivia about another one of my favorites, Saul Steinberg. This little tidbit stuck with me:
Hearing Saul talk about his road trips all over America, such as the one in which he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne, drove a Cadillac they had bought from Igor Stravinsky from New York to Los Angeles, I understood that they and my family could well have crossed paths.
I like the idea of driving across the country in a Cadillac. I especially love the idea of it being a caddy that was previously owned by Stravinsky. My guess is that the composer owned the car while living in his Los Angeles house that I’ve been obsessed with for a couple of years, but now I’d like to know a little more about Stravinsky’s cars.
Hotel Life
There was an article in the New York Post recently about writers living in hotels once again, with the focus being my friend Stan Parish, who wrote one of my favorite books of the year, Love and Theft. I had actually talked to a few folks in the hotel industry before Covid and mentioned that a great way to improve the culture of their hotels is to offer artists like Stan a place to work, that maybe comping writers or artists a few nights would be a nice way to make their places feel like more of a “scene” (that was the word one person used, not me). I know some place like Ace Hotel in NYC offered up residencies to writers like Morgan Parker or musicians like Nick Zinner, and I’ve collaborated with spots like Chicago Athletic Association on events in the past, but I think hotels should try and open up their doors more to artists as we slowly get ourselves to a comfortable and safe spot where we can start traveling again. I say this as somebody who spent a lot of the early part of lockdown reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies that features interesting people from different worlds all spending time in a place together. Of course, in a lot of cases there was a murder involved (Altman’s Gosford Park and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game), but before somebody got offed, I’d find myself longing to be in a place where I’m around a bunch of fascinating stranger again, and I’ve found that hotel lobbies or bars are often the perfect place for that. I think the Ace spots have been especially good at that, carving out room for people who aren’t staying at the hotel to come and work. But it would be cool to make hotels more than just places where people stay.
Although I would consider capping off how much booze the artists are allowed to have. You don’t want some drunken Scott and Zelda situation happening where you have writers jumping into fountains and all that.
Although that could be funny.