The early hour

I love the calm and quiet of the early-morning hours, so I'm never too frustrated when I awake early. (Unless, of course, I have a late night and then have to drag my ass to work.) Usually if I'm up early and the weather is co-operating, I'll put on the running togs and head out for 40 minutes. But because I seemed to have done a number on my right leg when I wiped out yesterday morning on the slippery sidewalk, I decided to jot down a few words before getting out of bed.

(Quick aside: listening to an interview and performance by Laila Biali, a jazz singer and pianist now living in New York City. Funny, I used to see her often playing at the Pilot, where she was the basically the house pianist. Nice to see that she's making a serious go as a professional musician.)

In fact, for a period of time a few years ago, I was trying to get up a little early every morning to write what I called the "morning papers." It was an idea expressed in the book The Artist's Way. Not that I had any pretensions or grand illusions that I was an "artist," but I was hoping it would at least open my mind every morning, get the creative juices flowing before sitting down to the work that paid the rent. And at least that work - I was a freelance writer - had a creative element to it, although toward the end I was doing crap (writing marketing brochures and the like) that felt like the most uncreative work there was. (I can't tell you how many boring business-y type guys I had to chat with on a daily basis. Marketing and sales people, yuck.) The morning papers I would write - very free-flowing, sometimes totally non-sensical stuff - was my one daily lifeline to creativity.

I still get the occasional jones to get back to writing in the morning, although I find I need to use the computer now rather than write longhand. So maybe that's something I'll be sharing on here in the near future. Watch this space.