I have got out of the habit of writing in my journal and I guess I should try to get back into it.

Habits. What would our lives be like without them? Quite different, no doubt. My diet, in particular, would be different.

I was thinking about that at breakfast this morning while Mary and I had our black coffee and buttermilk-muffin and egg sandwiches with slices of faux bacon on the side, just as we have every morning, without fail, for the past decade, give or take a few years, and excepting when we run out of supplies in the winter, of course. In which case we invariably turn to pancakes.

Maybe it isn't surprising that I've always fallen into eating routines. Outside of keeping me alive, food doesn't do much for me. If I didn't make a habit of it, I'd forget to take nourishment entirely. As a kid, I hated being called in for supper. Who wants to leave off fleeing Godzilla or re-enacting the gunfight at the O.K. Corral for meatloaf?

During my teenage years I survived on the occasional hotdog in a bun. Even in the pre-microwave era, boiling a hotdog in water didn't waste much valuable reading time, and I could hold my whole meal in one hand while I kept open an Ace Double in the other.

I drank hot tea, with sugar and a slice of lemon while I was reading, or writing, or drawing, or watching television. I'm not sure if my skinny adolescent body, when in motion had a tendency to stay in motion, but when at rest it had a tendency to have a cup of tea sitting within reach.

I suspect I could have actually deciphered words on a page to read them, let alone write, without ingesting tea. You've heard of ink-stained wretches? I was a tea and mustard stained wretch.

Now that I'm older I've broken that bad habit. I rarely drink tea. Not even when I'm writing. I don't need tea to write these days. Is this long enough? I need to go turn on the percolator.