Ruby Beach, February 2007
Getting up really early, well it never gets really easy. But it does get tolerable. When I was younger and first moved to Seattle and worked in restaurants I used to get up to catch the bus at around 4 am. Of course I drank somewhat more in those days. Nothing quite like a whiskey hangover and the dim fluorescents of a metro bus at four-thirty on a winter morning in a strange new city. The desolation and futility of such an existence seems comically melodramatic now, but I’m still tethered to those days by slender threads of muscle memory, free association, and a knack for packing as much headache as possible behind one bloodshot left eye…
You can never truly forget such things, so sometimes when I flick on the kitchen fluorescents at 4 am I get an associative migraine. But the thought that I’m doing this for just for me is plenty to snap me out of it.