The last time i was told to write continuously for 5 minutes without stopping was in 10th grade, when my high school english teacher made our class just write for 5 mins, then another 5, and another 5, without the pen stopping for a moment on the paper or taking time to think. The purpose of the exercise, he said, was to show that if you just keep writing (thinking), you will inevitably produce an original thought. After this exercise, the entire class agreed that we had each written something that was interesting enough to expand on further. The point was it didn't matter if you wrote "i cant think of anything, i can't think of anything" because eventually, as our human monkey brains always do, something would pop into our heads and end up on the page, like a stream of consciousness documented on paper. The hand writes slower than the thoughts that enter our minds, so there is actually an oversupply of ideas. Even right now as I am writing I can feel this. I am not worrying about if i am using correct punctuation, nor am i worried about what others will think. I am trying to avoid typos, but sometimes i will make htem. I want to write more, i need to write more, but writing fully polished ideas and editing and revising them feels like a gargantuan task i can only bring myself to do so often. To build the habit of writing i need to write more. To write more i need to remove these reasons that stop me from doing so. to do that, i need a place i can go, free of judgement, where errors and no formal thinking or structure are required. And to do so in public is at least some small act of bravery, because this is on the internet, and people i admire, who i want the respect of, who i want to think I am smart, can see it. So here goes, i have a timer going, I am watching the sunrise at 6:40AM PST from beautiful westlake village, california. And i am "doing the thing!" unencumbered, freely, like I did 10 years ago. and that's time...