Morning reading, coffee, writing

“morning newspaper reading”

That’s what I just typed into my blog’s search function. I was, am, sure that I have often written about my early morning newspaper reading habits. When this blog started in 2006 they were still pretty much the same as they were in 1999 when I started a proto blog, my website “www.snowbizz.com.” From my beginnings as an unemployed teacher, stay at home Dad, political gadfly and writer wannabe they remained the same until cellphones. I would spend one and a half to two hours reading the Duluth News Tribune while listening to NPR radio news a habit I acquired in the late 80’s or 90’s.

So with the three words typed as such I was shooting in the dark. No doubt I have described my morning habits a few times before but what set of words would send the perfect blog post on the subject out of the tens of thousands of posts I’ve written. I had eight posts returned to me with headings that obviously had anything to do with the subject. Possibly all of them had those three words in them in some random order. If I’d put quote marks around them they might have returned a fewer posts but as I said such a combination was just a shot in the dark.

This is not the subject I wanted to write about but the thirty minutes I just spent getting the additional coffee I wanted but was too late to sip from the batch Claudia made knocked me off course. I woke late but refreshed eager to begin writing but I wanted more coffee to reinforce my drive. So, I drove up to a very busy coffee joint and spent fifteen minutes there watching seven very conscientious young people who at one time had 15 people in front of the counter waiting to have their orders fulfilled. I was one of them. I gamed it all wrong. I saw a line of six cars and decided it would be quicker to go in. I’m sure the car line was given a much higher prioritization.

I have two major projects for today. Three hours of passing out a flyer for Alanna Oswald and three hours of organizing writing and editing a string of columns for the Reader well in advance of headlines so I can get ahead of them. I stopped writing for half a year because I was no able to generate the concentration to turn them in on time each week. As hoped that long vacation has filled my head with countless column ideas to crank out. Several more occured to me this morning as I read the beginnings of a dozen articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post my new go-tos since the decline of the Tribune after its take over by Forum Communications.

On my post-it covered wall under “campaign platforms” is a plank for federally subsidizing local news as a counter to the balderdash that so many grifters can pay for and pollute the knowledge-verse.

So I have cooling coffee waiting for the microwave to fortify my until noon. Wish me editing luck.

NOTE – SORRY NO TIME TO PROOF READ THIS.

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