Routine Vs. Drama

The Everyday Compared to The New (Inner and Outer Life)

Photo by Mitesh on Unsplash

~Today’s essay is part of a series (we’ve been doing these for over a year now) by Latham Turner, Bowen Dwelle, Michael Mohr, Dee Rambeau, Lyle McKeany and Joshua Doležal, a group of men writing on Substack who tackle difficult, simple and profound topics.

This week, all of us explore the concept of The Ordinary in life, routine, the day-to-day, etc. Other series’ have covered: trust fatherhood recovery work, home and philosophy.

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I think it’s fair to say that, in the long narrative arc of my time being alive, I’ve had a pretty wild life. From some of the sketchy experiences I had as a child to my intense hardcore punk rock teens to my drifting, alcoholic twenties hitchhiking across America to my sober thirties walking 450 miles across Northern Spain, moving to New York City, chasing my unlikely dream of being a self-supporting writer across the cosmos to surviving East Harlem during COVID to now moving with my wife to Spain.

During all that time I moved constantly, from one apartment to another and one city to another. I mainlined heroin. I tried close to every drug you can think of. I traveled abroad several times. I worked a million different pointless dead-end jobs. I got arrested half a dozen times. I got into several multiple-roll car crashes. I hopped freight trains. I got into fist fights for no reason.

I often blacked-out from excessive drinking (in my twenties) ending up in towns and cities and with women I didn’t even know or remember or understand how I got there. Much of it is now a sonic, inner salacious blur. Suffice to say it’s a miracle I survived. Suffice to say I’m grateful to be alive. Suffice to say that now, at 42 years of age and 14.6 years sober, happily married and about to leave the United States for Europe: I am still an unconventional man.

All the above being true: All of my wildness probably has made up maybe 25% of my life. The remaining 75% has been more or less calm, placid, conventional, normal and routine. Even seasoned war-reporting global journalists spend much of their time sleeping, sitting around and writing, alone and bored. Then the action comes and it’s a blast of adrenaline and glorious chaos.

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For a long time now I’ve had more or less the same routine, though it varies in different nuanced, subtle ways. I generally go to sleep early: Oftentimes I’m literally in bed by 7:00, 7:30pm. (I shower first, always at night.) I then read generally for about two hours. This is my sacred, silent reading time. Britney and I will chat a bit on and off during this time but always briefly. Often I give her The Look if she talks for too long, which means, basically, Shut up, I’m reading.

She does her night routine of skin lotions, etc, which gives me my silence and alone time. Then she herself slides into bed and reads as well. (She’s been reading Sherman Alexie’s 2019 memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. She’s over halfway through the book and, lately, she sniggers and chuckles a lot because, she says, she’s shocked by how similar Alexie and I are, as writers and as deep, sensitive, formerly dysfunctional humans.)

Britney always falls asleep before me, after only a few pages of reading, sometimes more like 5 or 10. (To give her credit she plowed all the way through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment last year, a few pages a night.) I pass out usually around 9:30, sometimes 10. I shut the book (I am currently reading Kafka: The Early Years, Book 1 in a three-volume tryptic by German author Reiner Stach.

In the morning I wake up after Britney. She usually gets up around 5, 5:30am. The cats wake her, her natural (and sometimes fairly brutal) alarm. I generally wake up anywhere between 5:45 and 6:30. (Most often about 5:50-6.) Britney and I kiss and say good morning but are mostly silent. Morning is a sacred time for both of us. But she’s a morning person; I, most certainly, am not. I chug water. I make Irish or English Breakfast hot black tea with half-and-half. Then I sit in the living room on a chair or the couch—lately Britney stays at the big table in the kitchen, one of our house’s best features—and I sip tea and wake up, doing nothing else for about 15 minutes.

I should mention. Lately at night I have been putting my phone on silent and leaving it in another room. This helps with sleep and lower anxiety. I usually don’t read the news anyway (I listen to political podcasts) but the temptation at night for me is to look at Substack Notes. And that provokes anxiety. Similarly, in the morning I do not look at news, Substack, text or check email. I don’t mess with my phone until usually around 9:30, 10am, after I am caffeinated and well awake and I have done my morning ritual. This retains my basic sanity. I don’t understand people who, upon opening their eyes and barely coming to consciousness in the morning, immediately check social media, news, etc. No wonder people are so angry at the world!

After I’ve had a couple big mugs of tea and have read my book again for about an hour—during this time Britney does yoga/her workout in the office—we switch places: I sit at my desk in the office and write and Britney makes us a basic breakfast of eggs and wholewheat toast. She calls when it’s ready and I come and get mine. I continue to write, roughly from 8-10am. After that—now fully sated with food, caffeine and writing—I finally check email, look at Substack, post Notes, etc. Around 11am I head out to do my first paid dog-walk.

The day goes forward again, one more circle round the horn.

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Routine is an interesting habit, an interesting phenomenon. I think it fundamentally rests on the human desire for a sense of safety. It’s akin to eating comfort food. It warms your [psychological] belly, makes you feel safe and comfortable and at ease. Probably if you take the idea far enough one might even venture to say that, at bottom, routine might even be about “defying death,” symbolically speaking. It’s one of the few things in life that we can more or less control, in a mostly out of control world.

If you think about it, most of life is out of our hands: How people perceive or treat us; our friends and family members’ actions; what happens at work or what our boss decides to do; the luck of a promotion or the unluck of a car crash; etc etc etc. And of course the ultimate: Death. We can’t control the fact that we all die. Not only that: We can’t even control how or when we die. Could be tomorrow or in 50 years (for me). Or in five minutes.

Most people choose (and it doesn’t even feel like a choice, it’s largely not even conscious) to live their lives as if they’ll live more or less forever. We suppress the fact that we die—and the fact that we have zero control over how and when—because it’s too awkward, too terrifying, too grotesque, too uncomfortable, too shocking, too painful—because it’s simply much safer and easier than the alternative. We’ve all done this. It’s programed into our hyper self-aware, metacognitive human brains. We’re aware of our mortality yet we can suppress this very awareness out of a need to emotionally subsist.

But some people—and this is one of the things that make writers different and freakish—have ripped through the fourth dimension and have come to terms with the deeper, gritty reality and have decided that, instead of running from this grim truth, they want to face it and, not only that, but they want to take that knowledge and fear and translate it into linguistic power, expression on the page. That’s fundamentally what writers do. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that writers—the wonky, weird “artist” types who most people secretly (or openly) make fun of—in the end are the ones who are most realistic about our transient condition, who are most open to seeing things as they actually are. Most people are in full-blown denial but they have normalized that denial and called us the freaks.

This deep self-consciousness we writers possess—this deep self-awareness and the aperture of spiritual vision which allows us to face the hardest reality of our condition—means that we’re more or less never bored, because we don’t solely rely on our superficial external reality. We also have a deep and profound inner life. And this inner life can be incredibly exciting, even—and especially!—when our external life seems boring and full of ennui. Instead of dulling our brains with blaring TVs or YouTube or streaming shows…we do something altogether novel (pun intended), which fewer and fewer people do today: We read these things called books. Or we go on walks around the neighborhood while imagining all kinds of beauty in our minds. We have long, stretched out, Platonic dialogues within our own minds. We go to Saturn, Mars, Pluto and back all while, physically, we only walk around the hood for an hour.

And of course we write. That, mainly and most importantly.

Drama punctuates our physical lives here and there, sometimes in massive, harsh and profound ways. But always there is still that deep, rich inner landscape. Many people are shocked that we don’t own a TV…or watch TV. That we only read books, or listen to books or to podcasts. Many times, too, I want to read books that lean further into death: Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Dostoevsky: Authors who leaned into death as much as feasible. Strangely—ironically—these stories comfort me instead of making me more afraid. What truly makes me afraid is the notion of having no inner life. The idea of deadening my brain with TV rot. The notion of spending all of my time online, watching news, being tribal and angry.

For me, life is a lovely admixture of sleep and dreams, nightmares and books, walks and inner world movement. Routine makes me feel safe, but not because I feel in control, but rather because I feel as if I can rely on something. Everything else is more or less unreliable. Life itself is unreliable. Life is an unreliable narrator. So is god. So is writing. So is existence.

I do feel I face “it.” Like Sal and Dean searching for that magical, spiritual, existential “it” in the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem in Kerouac’s On the Road.

For me that means facing the Inner Void. While most people are inside Plato’s cave, observing the shadows dancing on the walls, certain of their reality, I have exited the cave entirely, and am walking along the fields and the forests in the deepest feeling of love and gratitude that I get to be here in this moment one more time.

One more time.