Mornings

Mornings on days where there is no obligation to go to work feel very unique, as if there is a quality to them that renders the mind more lucid when taking part in short daily routine. Often this routine is an efficient compromise between the demands of the self and the demands of the day, but when the day demands little, it gives the self a bit more room to spread its influence over habits and nudges the refinement of a routine bespoke with whatever perverted impurities or tight corners one adds to it, consciously or subliminally. It’s ritualistic and rich with the essence that makes life worth living, and especially the essence that makes the other people closest to you (emotionally but also physically) worth appreciating consciously and profoundly. There is a deep intimacy in recognizing the careless kitchen footsteps of a family member or the muffled tones of a roommate’s voice between concrete walls when they gently ease you into awakening. These subtle experiences don’t all carry the same weight, not least those that you admire about a lover on a Sunday morning, but enough has been written about that and for good reason. Much like time, coffee tastes better when you’re sharing it with good company. Falling for laughs, vocal stims, unique grammatical inconsistencies, rhythms of breathing is even easier to do in front of that coffee in a similar way that sitting down at the dinner table with your parents builds a unique familial rapport. Anecdotally, while growing up, this type of intimacy was always a bit transactional, protestant, grabbing a breakfast taco on the way out to school alone. It was undeniably a self-imposed rule for a boy with a complicated relationship to solitude, however. This is to say that while these subtleties are beautiful, there is a lot of beauty in this world, subtle and explicit, that is rightfully taken for granted. Sometimes taking something for granted can be one of the most profound ways of showing appreciation for it.

Julian de Medeiros is a lacanian philosophy lecturer who is present on TikTok and posts his long lectures to YouTube, more recently and regrettably with some pretty abhorrent thumbnails that are embarassing to keep on a phone screen while on the Metro. Nevertheless, his videos make up a large part of the morning media diet of a certain badman, and in his most recently uploaded lecture titled The Age of Shamelessness, he tangentially offers a critique to the viral clip of Ta-Nehisi Coates doing a podcast, who after years of engaging in intellectual discourse about post-colonial power structures and race relations in the United States, is sharing the idea that as he grows older he strays further from seriously engaging with intellectual discourse and seeks to embrace a more heuristics-based application of wisdom and encourages others to do so. When watching the short video, it’s clear that the majority of the point that Coates is making is instead in regards to the elective ability of intellectuals to obfuscate dubious moral positions with jargon, but it does admittedly read as a championing of common sense over dedicated intellectual engagement, which de Medeiros takes serious issue with, for good reason. Examples of this phenomenon are present even in a late 20s life, watching the transition unfold in bright friends, intellectual family members (of which there is one), and the self is seemingly unavoidable as life experiences become broader and complex until you have to start debating whether or not to compress the guiding lights of life into bite-sized rules of thumb. Weak! Fucking weak! Everything is ’that deep’ and you absolutely believe that! You only think that you don’t believe that because you are a coward. Maybe that’s a bit harsh. Whatever the case, heuristic seems like a “degrading” force in social engagement, a symptom of conformity becoming anti-conformity in a world becoming increasingly post-postmodernist, especially among the often alienated youth. This is not at all to deride a return to sincerity away from constant irony (read again the entire first paragraph here if that isn’t obvious) but to say that a return to heuristic or a “RETVRN” of sorts is inconsistent with that, though it may seem much the opposite at first thought! Go into your days deliberately, smell the flowers that the morning gives you, but don’t do it every day - you may find, paradoxically, that letting yourself take things for granted is a more rewarding method of building a more digestible habitable fantasy than cutting corners on thinking by not reading into things. That is assuming that memory needs to be thought of as being compressed at all though.