Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio - On Time, Routines, & Writing

Aug 27, 2026

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A personal essay linking Faulkner’s view of time with the everyday rituals of writers and artists. It frames pocket watches, family heirlooms, and the mechanics of “complications” as metaphors for living within limited time, not trying to conquer it. Through references to Steinbeck, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and others, the text surveys practical routines—music, longhand drafts, pencil sharpening, reading cycles—and connects these habits to creative perseverance and comfort.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLifestyle

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time22 min

AccessFree to download

On Time, Routines, & Writing

Heirlooms and the metaphor of time

How writers write

Daily rituals and creative perseverance

Peter Wayne Moe Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he saidI give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt thatyou will use it to gain the reductor absurdum of all human experience which can fityour individual needs no better than itfitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not thatyou may remember time, but thatyou mightforget it now and then for a moment and not spend allyour breath trying to conquer it. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury A special thank you to Danielle Daligdig, whose work I quote with permission. We are at a coffee shop, my brother and I, his pocket watch on the table, mine in my jacket. That night, he’d made us bok choy and salmon. We are reading now, Faulkner. My brother moved to Colorado a few years ago to climb and soon after became an English teacher. He has no television, and when I stepped off the plane, he handed me a copy of The Sound and the Fury, showed me his, and said,“We’ll read this while you’re in town.” And so we do. Over breakfast. In the mountains, sitting on a rock, taking a break from the hike. Atthe bar. In his living room. I get to know Benji, Caddy, Quentin, and Dilsey during my four days in Yoknapatawpha County. The watches were from our father when his passed. My brothers and I each received a cigar box with three gifts: a Leatherman, a pocket watch, and a CD of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, my grandfather’s favorite album. On the back of the watch are two dates––March 27, 1927 and January 6, 1996. I think of all this now, this morning––Faulkner, my brother, my father, my grandfather, those timepieces––as I stand before my dresser, winding my wristwatch. I bring it to my ear, listening to its 26 gears spinning on their jewels. I pop the crown, turn it a dozen times, set the date, swing the hands into place. The second hand begins its sweep and I my day. When a watch has additional features on its face––the date, a chronograph, a moon phase dial, atourbillon––it’s called a “complication.” I love that term for how it calls up the mechanical. The case can only hold so much, and adding a feature––a subsidiary dial, say––means more gears must squeeze into that tight space. It complicates things. The watch case and its limitations seem an apt metaphor for time itself: limited. And this is the wisdom from Faulkner, the need to be within time without trying to conquer it. How Writers Write “And above all I must take my time,” writes John Steinbeck, in Working Days, a diary he kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath.“Take it easy. I don’t mean to write less or less forcefully but to keep the frantic quality out of my approach.”He does so through music.“I think I’ll play The Swan”(31) . Steinbeck listens to Tchaikovsky each day, the rhythm and intonation and harmony helpful as he pieces together his sentences. I figure that if Steinbeck wrote longhand, I should give it a shot. Worked well for him. I am writing this draft longhand, the first time I’ve written an essay longhand since, I believe, 1997. And I’m listening to Swan Lake. Steinbeck would have listened on vinyl; I’ve got a performance playing on YouTube. Swan Lake is almost three hours. He would have had to get up every 20 minutes or soto flip his record; I’m interrupted by ads. I suspect his speakers were better than the tinny ones on my nearby laptop. I find Steinbeck fascinating for his many accounts of the daily rituals of a writer. In a series of letters he wrote to his editor while drafting East of Eden, Steinbeck reveals he begins each day by sharpening at least 60 pencils (36). He’s smitten by the Blackwing––“they really glide over the paper” (34)––so I’ve got eight Blackwings at my side now. And though Matthew Kirschenbaum calls Microsoft Word the No. 2 pencil of the digital age”(237), when writing longhand Stephen King prefers a Wat

FAQs

How does the essay connect pocket watches to the theme of time?

It treats the mechanics and “complications” of watches as a metaphor for time’s limitations, emphasizing living within time rather than trying to conquer it.

What writing routines does the essay highlight from other authors?

It describes routines such as Steinbeck writing with music, drafting longhand, and sharpening pencils; it also notes steady daily word targets and structured reading and writing periods from other writers.

Why does the essay include the Leonardo DiCaprio grocery-shopping story?

It uses the scene to underscore ordinariness and intimacy—observing a celebrity shop like “the rest of us” makes creative and human struggle feel relatable.

Aug 27, 2026

Upload by Tawan