THE DIARY OF AN ORDINARY DAY

By Massimo Usai

(Italian version here)

At 7 o’clock the alarm goes off, as every ordinary day.

Since the pandemic began, I could also push the alarm to 9 am, and in any case, I start to be active around 9.30 am, but I give myself a few hours myself.

Once awakened, I first make myself a coffee and sit on the sofa, enjoying the aroma of the Moka.

I have two Mokas (do you use the plural for the Moka in this way as I wrote?).

One single-dose and one larger, reminiscent of the Italian flag; the first coffee always comes from the small and old mocha.

After taking at least ten minutes to drink the coffee, savour it in the palate and wait for its taste to slowly fade from the mouth, I get up and head to the bathroom.

I quickly take a shower, dress carefully, and get comfortable once again on the sofa.
I wait for the second coffee of the morning to come out, this time from the most prominent coffee maker, tricolour, yes like the Italian flag, to understand us better.

Honestly, it takes me two hours to become a functioning human being, and without coffee, I know well that I could not cope.

I know it might not seem like the most relaxing start, but I always listen to music at a certain pace before I’m fully ready to work.

When I work, then I rarely listen to music. If I do, it is with decidedly relaxing sounds, which do not have too many words and are of a language unknown to me, just so as not to be distracted by the words.

But on my journey to being an active person, the Clash or the Talking Heads – they’re the only thing that helps me feel awake.

This awakening phase depends on deciding after what to write, what to promote, publish, or analyse.

It is an imprint of action that I like to call “Old Style“, and that if I slightly modify this routine, I suffer resoundingly for the rest of the day.

Working for oneself means managing one’s day, moments, times.

It’s up to me to manage the to-do list and what I want to post for that day. I take records to play throughout the day through the entire analytical process I use to run my business.

Since I buy music, I have in mind when I’ll listen to it and their modification on the playback times that I had marked in my programming of the day; it is not light action to perform.

My goal has always been to play records that stand out from the crowd.

Therefore, I am always looking for new groups, singers or rediscoveries of things I had left out in the past. I look for new stories, stories that have never been heard before by my ears.

Stories accompanied by notes, no matter how many, it matters that they are penetrating into my soul.

In these first winter days, it is the rediscovery of Nick Cave’s album that help me.
Recorded alone at the Alexandra Palace in London, I decided that this was the right recond to console my body’s first internal tremors at the end of the first lockdown. A sensation coming from the temperature dropped very fast recently.

Today is December, Christmas will arrive soon.