As Is Now

New bonus podcast, routines & rituals & the illusion of continuity, + a ton of links, art & more

Intro

Just because I do the same goddamned things every single morning doesn’t mean I HAVE to do the same goddamned things every morning. It means I LIKE to do the same goddamned things every morning. Or it works. Or fine I’m obsessive-compulsive.

FTR, here’s how every morning starts, unless I have to go somewhere (like when I joined The Guys to run or walk):

• Get up (usu. ~5 am)

• Turn on the electric kettle in the kitchen

• Downstairs to bathroom

• ~12-min. exercise routine: 2 minutes of jackknife stretch (palms on floor, deep stretch), 4 sun salutations, 75-sec. plank, 10 knuckle pushups, 10 palm pushups, 3 sets of 15 clamshells w/resistance band (15 on each side), 25 ab crunches

• Clean up, get dressed, grind coffee

• Upstairs to kitchen to make pourover coffee for me & Amy (who’s still trying to sleep)

• Coffee + iPad — email, browse, etc. — while I ice each of my knees for 15 minutes (precautionary)

• Downstairs to walk around the backyard+driveway while I have a banana and take in the morning

• Sit at The Analog Desk and reread yesterday’s 2 pages of Emily Dickinson poems, then randomly flip to another 2 pages of her poems

• Write a page or two in my journal

• Write my postcard-a-day (I may or may not know who I’m sending it to when I write it)

• Walk outside to drop off the postcard in my mailbox

In that order. At which point I can say, “Whatever else happens today, at least I got that done.” (I’m thinking of adding “make some art” after the “postcard in mailbox”, since I find it easier to draw when I don’t have my contacts in, but that might be the straw that breaks this camel’s back.) (I should also note that this is a work in (slow) progress: the Dickinson thing is a recent addition, the postcards were a 2022 New Year’s Resolution, and the exercises have evolved.)

One of the funny things about that repetitiveness is the illusion of continuity it breeds: you don’t exactly notice the changes that much. But after my dad suffered a bout of ill health last week (he’s feeling better, thanks), I read an old journal to look up the time I took him to the ER at the end of 2020. His wife & I both recall my bringing him in, but couldn’t remember the symptoms or what they diagnosed.

So I checked it out in that journal, found out what had happened, and then kept reading, curious as to what else soon-to-be-50 Gil was writing about. Turns out he was a funny guy, and profoundly disliked Godfather 3. There were all sorts of observations that I won’t share with you, but it struck me that he also didn’t know what was coming, good & bad. Didn’t know he’d discover drawing & painting, CLL, postcards, weights, yoga, Didion’s The White Album, Gwen John, Nick Cave, and sweet jeebus it’s been a busy 30 months. On the plus side, he had much better handwriting than mid-52 Gil.

I hope you had a good 4th of July and/or Canada Day, didn’t lose any fingers or eyebrows in fireworks mishaps, and can look back at your earlier incarnations with some degree of familiarity, some degree of estrangement. And that the notes they leave you are legible.

Oh, and if you have any sorta morning routine, leave it in the Comments for this one:

And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show.

Podcastery

This week, I posted a bonus mini-episode of The Virtual Memories Show. I’d planned to take the holiday week off, but over the weekend I received the video of the June 19th remembrance / memorial for the late writer/editor Michael Denneny, so I decided to post my ~4-min. improvised monologue from that event, along with a brief intro. Think of it as a coda to the monologue I recorded in April the day after finding Michael dead in his apartment (we were going to record a talk about his new collection, On Christopher Street) and my followup a week later. You can also just watch the video of my spiel at the memorial, where I give off manic street preacher vibes (it’s below, too). Give it a listen and go read On Christopher Street

Last week, I posted Episode 544 of The Virtual Memories Show feat. investigative journalist & longtime pal Mitchell Prothero, who joins the show to talk about his new podcast, GATEWAY: Cocaine, Murder, and Dirty Money in Europe (Project Brazen). We get into how the project evolved from his reporting on the global war on terror, how the cocaine trade mirrors the globalization wave, how Colombia’s piece deal led to mega-cartel consolidation, and whether the Netherlands trial of drug kingpin Ridouan Taghi reveals cracks in the security of the state itself. We also talk about the differences between writing for a podcast vs. writing for readers (like his reporting at VICE News), the changes in the media landscape over the course of his career, and his path through journalism, covering our days together in Annapolis to his time as a Capitol Hill reporter to stints in Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, and beyond. And we discuss how living and reporting in Baltimore in the 1990s prepared him for pretty much any scenario he’s encountered since. Give it a listen! And go listen to GATEWAY

Other recent episodes: Joseph Monninger • Andrew Porter • Jonathan Papernick • Scott Samuelson

Links & Such

• RIP Sue Johanson . . . RIP Alan Arkin . . .

• Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a lovely/loving tribute to Bob Gottlieb.

• Great piece by Michael Dirda on how his literary predictions from 1997 hold up.

• Big New Yorker profile of Samuel R. Delany.

• Love this Stoya piece about burlesque performance and performativity, and much more.

• Rian Hughes’ novel XX covered all this gravity-wave/colliding galaxy stuff already, but it’s nice to see it corroborated.

• Gilbert Gottfried’s daughter Lily made a short doc about her dad’s visual art (incl. appearance by Drew Friedman).

• Ben Schwartz wrote about the Great Collapsing Culture Bubble.

• Great longread by Sally Jenkins about Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. (I was Team Navratilova, fwiw.)

• Emily Wilson wrote about translating the Iliad, via the lens of numerous translations of Hector’s goodbye to Andromache. (I was Team Patroclus, fwiw.)

• In 2010, I wrote about a bazillion translations of one line in Anna Karenina, when Levin first sees Kitty, and why I was lucky that my first encounter with it was the Maudes’ translation: “He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”

• BLOODSUCKING SEA LAMPREYS!

• The new issue of my ‘zine, Haiku for Business Travelers, has my 2-page guide to how I make fantastic pourover coffee. I like the ritual of it, but some people want everything to be more convenient. (BTW, if you want a free copy of HfBT, hit me up.)

• One of my readers responded to last week’s e-mail and my Joseph Monninger episode by sending me this wonderful poem by Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come.

Current reading

To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse - Howard Fishman

Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Art

I drew some things on my new drawing table! I worked from a Caleb Crain pic of a redwinged blackbird but decided I’d go nuts w/a brush-pen rather than try to use colored pencils for the various shades of black-blue. The next morning I did a quick DOTD face of Mordecai Richler (too long, just like all my faces). I also slathered the watercolors on an ink-drawing of a peony, wrecking that, but it felt good to remind myself, “Destruction is your metier.” I’m glad I started art-making again. Sorry you have to suffer through it. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I only did 4 days of my weights-yoga cycle, Saturday-Tuesday, because Friday was a Very Rough Day for me, involving driving my dad around to a variety of medical appointments, getting into a collision in a parking lot (Dad wasn’t in the car at the time, neither the other driver nor I were injured, and our cars drove fine after), and dealing with heat & unhealthy air quality throughout. By the time I got home, it was Fried-Day. I “ran” 4.75 miles with The Guys on Saturday morning, still slow, but I was less sore the next day than the previous, shorter run, so that’s good.

Until Next Week

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next week, with two new podcasts (I’m ambitious), some great links, some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.

You have no gods, they’ve all disowned you,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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