As I situate the next visitor here at the Studiola, go grocery shopping for her, and figure out a new way to count my pages/progress, I have this:

Here are Jamey Hatley’s thoughts from modern conjure on rules for consecutive writing early this year.

And, I offer you some things I’ve learned so far here in Nola Studiola land:

1. wake up early. for the love of all that’s productive and temperature-based.

2. bartenders can be on your side when you want to watch the euro cup and the management switches the tv you’re sitting near to pga golf. said bartender does not have to fight your battles for you, but she can do lots of things to throw things in your favor. a certain bartendress at the rum house did yesterday, and it made all the difference to me. and tuna ceviche.

3. pool/bar/old house “club” is done in quite a civilized manner in this city. perhaps no other city could be so civilized about this.

4. seeing friends is a good idea. mine are buying houses, coordinating poetry brothels, going back to school to be nutritionists. they are inspiring. i’m glad i have those friends.

5. though it would be preferable, of course, you don’t have to have a magpie-quality coffeeshop to survive in new orleans. sometimes good-enough coffee and a beautiful old house-turned-coffeeshop is all you need to get your bearings.

6. your friend who lends you her apartment for a Studiola might not ever know what the gift has meant to you, and you can try to to show her, but it is okay if it takes a while to express, and it’s not something to get het up about. it is okay to relax and accept kindness. it is okay to listen.

And for some outsides pulling into the insides of the Studiola:

It is okay, perhaps better than okay to

“Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.” -Lidia Yuknavitch

but it is also right and good and enough not to think too hard about it all.