It was a morning exercise that he practiced without fail, no matter how he felt or how busy he was or how late it would make him for work... well, at least it did when he still had a job. Clearing away the shadows and vagueness of the night, like cleaning dust or mud or cobwebs when coming inside, was just how he started his day: he opened his laptop and wrote a single page of thoughts.

Usually sleep didn't leave much to wipe off, just a dusting of memory. Sometimes the mud was thick and heavy and difficult to scrape off, falling in large clods that would break apart and crumble as they hit the screen. He was fairly certain that much of it never made much sense, or at least made much less sense later when he was fully awake. He wasn't really sure because he never saved what he wrote. It was an exercise in head clearing, not collecting. He was pretty sure he didn't want to revisit what was offloaded - it would be like wanting to look at the fat you burned off after exercising, an he couldn't imagine anything more yawn inducing than watching collected videos of someone's daily exercise routine.

As for physical exercise, the kind that required the actual movement of things other than his fingers and of it was one thing that he was not getting much of these days.