My Morning Routine

I woke up this morning in a half-dream. In the half-dream, I wrote out this entire entry by hand in my special notebook of fantasy and whimsy. Daylight was breaking through my windows, so I decided to get up and drink the pot of coffee I had left to sit on the burner for two hours. But then, I actually woke up - half-dazed and confused by my surroundings. I find that when this occurs, the best thing to do is pretend like I'm home and try to act as casual as possible. Anyone who knows me, knows that this is a bit difficult because I sleep naked, and the nature of the male anatomy demands that my morning erection exist simply for making all of my social interactions awkward. This proved to be an odd feat, because I live by myself. But since it was four o'clock in the morning anyway, I figured "Eh."

Standing outside on my fire escape drinking my coffee, wearing a robe I only reserve for myself on cold mornings and for the women who choose to sleep with me, I watched the sun come up over the horizon of downtown Brooklyn. Downtown Brooklyn will be getting invaded later this summer by the MTV TV show The Real World, a show that isn't so much about "reality" as it is about the guise of generic reality. I, of course, live in an interesting reality filled with stock mergers and boys who commit drive-bys on tricycles - it is Brooklyn, after all.

As the morning continued on, I went to the gym. There in the locker room, at six in the morning, I am submitted to what I like to call "The Museum of Inevitably," or more succinctly: a collection of naked old men with pride. Though I often try to play things off casually, it gets especially difficult as the oldest of the old men there - Bart Johnstone of Sunset Park, a healthy 73 years old - has taken a shining to me, and often tells me I remind him of the grandson he never had. Bart, though a jovial guy, demands to know why I don't pay more attention to The New York Yankees and I, in return, demand to know why he can't at least wear a towel when we converse. This is my usual pre-work-out routine, Monday to Thursday, and alternating Saturdays when I'm not hung-over.

After the gym, I usually go home, take a shower, make another cup of coffee, and proceed with an occupation known as "work." Assumedly, I'm writing. In reality, I'm hanging-out on Facebook, staring intently at photo albums of other people's lives and wishing fondly for one of my own. For some this may sound incredibly depressing. Actually, it is a Fried family tradition. I can remember staying with my grandparents as a child at their apartment on The Main Line. Around seven o'clock in the evening, my grandmother would dress-up like Jackie O, my grandfather like JFK, and we would all sit in the living room and look through old scrapbooks of the Camelot Era White House. My grandmother would say something like "My, how happy they look." My grandfather would reply "Indeed." I, in my youthful stupidity, would say "Why are we looking at these pictures?" My grandfather would then rap me over the head with his Harvard yearbook and lock me in a closet, filled with nothing but musty classical music records and old bottles of vodka. Soon enough, I learned to bide those dark times by indulging in the family's generation-long alcoholism problem. It was then, and only then, that I learned how to appreciate the proud Fried tradition of false hope.

By twelve noon, I usually step out to get some lunch. Life as a writer can be quite solitary, and exhausting sometimes.