It's 8:45AM and I'm sipping an americano and wifi from Uptown Espresso in Belltown. I was awakened at 4 as I am every morning, by a brain too quickly spinning through the fragments of my days: fixing bugs on Tomorrow Space, reaching new segments on online community wranglers, how I can be a better father/husband/friend/executive/citizen/sapien, and turning over the news that cancer has once again infiltrated a member of my extended family.
When my stomach got too tight and my inner cacophony too loud, I dressed in the dark and the first light of the day came when I crack the Mac to fire up Reader to begin my infovore's feast. 400 feeds later I spun through the nights tweets, got my email boxen to empty, and started the kettle for tea.
For the next hour (and two cups of Earl Grey) I skim political blogs and build a social map of that community, looking for people who can gather a community around them and for signs that they recognize the need for synchronous meetups. I'm working on a market vertical for Tomorrow Space, it's true, but like most knowledge workers there's never just one project, one story, for any slice of work. The same people who might find value in virtual event halls could foment movement in organization of an online city, could back a municipal server cloud, or any of a dozen other connections against the mesh of interrelated projects in which I'm playing different roles.
And then I took a shower and sang my daughter her morning wakeup song. She slept well and so Shelley (her mother) and I successfully tiptoe through the groggy period into that happy morning ritual of breakfast, car talk, and drop off at day care. Through it all there are New Yorker articles browsed, NPR in the background, and the people of Seattle around us, emitting style and state in our standing wave of culture.
And now I'm going to post this, pick up the parking ticket which I see through the coffee shop windows that I've just received, and head to Ian's to start the work day.
