Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, standing before the Millennium Grizzly Bear, in Cockburn’s garden in Petrolia. January 1, 2001.
It’s six in the morning here in Oregon City. The sun won’t be up for another hour. Rain is pounding the windows, but I hear the tea kettle whistling. I make pot of Moroccan mint and settle behind the Mac, an old dog curled up at my feet and a black cat standing on the table brushing his back against the screen. There will be no breakfast. There hasn’t been any breakfast in two months. I’ve been hoodwinked into following an “intermittent fast,” which prohibits any food from 7 PM to 11 AM. I don’t recommend it.
I check the CounterPunch page to make sure all of the morning’s stories have posted, since they were edited and loaded into WordPress last night. Occasionally there are screw-ups, usually mine. All looks good so far. There are 15 new pieces today. A nice mix of stories ranging from Iran to Puerto Rico, the opioid crisis to the battle for Kirkuk.
Then I grit my teeth and download my email. There are 723 new messages in my inbox since I last checked eight hours ago. The count is a little higher than normal because of the annual fund drive. Every morning starts with a purge, wiping out the spam and the advertisements, the duplications, the bounces, the latest alerts on crisis actors in Vegas and thermite at Ground Zero. That leaves 548 messages that need my attention. First, I scan for advisories from the…