#302

Better. Feeling, that is. A little better. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be something approaching the new 100% fitness, sans caffeine, sans anything resembling a vice except a touch of sugar once a day. Suppose some consider video games a vice, but I don't know what to say to those people except most of what you can say about video games, positive and negative, can be said about books and paintings and music and basically art in general. If, in your worldview, art is a negative, your confusion is so total that we won't be able to communicate very effectively at all. I mean, you have to suspend your morals just to use language.

Well, anyhow, I also choose to retain the right to smoke a fine cigar on occasions. 

There's a decent chance that rather than waking up fine tomorrow, I will be awoken by an awful headache which is only tolerable in one single precisely upright sitting position, with my head held at one single precise angle; any deviation from this stasis will cause stabbing, otherworldly pain. It should go away in time for me to start work, but it's not a great way to pop the cork on a day. This happened a few times last time I quit drinking coffee.

Point of quitting caffeine is to give me more time and focus in the early mornings to exercise and maybe write a little. Making coffee takes a long time, being as we hand-grind beans and use a chemex-style coffeemaker. This makes for superior coffee. However, I'm also always torn between looking for more independence and imbibing chemicals as a ritual, but right now, I'm in independence mode, and I'm sick of needing coffee, from having to make it to having to sit and drink it. Rather be doing stuff. It's just not time I want to give to a thing anymore. And the contingencies of dependency always bother me. It's the best way for me to motivate myself to stop doing something--the strategic vulnerability, the weakness of need. Can't rely on cigs for sanity buffering; can't afford it in any sense. Can't rely on caffeine for anything; gotta be able to get up and go without aid, without guaranteeing painful incapacitation if I can't for any reason get it.

Yes, the less need the better. For example, it is time to end this post, because my need for nutrition is interfering with my drive to create. And needs must, dear reader.

--JL