Let’s Talk About Text, Baby!

I’ll be honest here, I’ve been in something of a creative slump for quite awhile now. 2019 was a hard year for me personally and I’m not great at writing my way through adversity. So I didn’t get a lot written. Then 2020 … I had such high hopes as 2020 started. The — you know — there was some more adversity. The anxiety and isolation of the pandemic did not do much for me creatively. I did some stuff, I still made some things, but nothing that was worth anyone’s time.

Now as we are beginning to return to a world filled with interesting and inspiring things, I have been getting prepared. In much the same way that I have been trying to get my body ready again for the world, I have been trying to get my creative brain back in gear again as well. That is part of the reason I have started writing this here little blog again. I know that no one reads it, but I have never really written it to be read. I’ve always written it just for the writing of it. This is the mental equivalent of going to the gym. I just have to do it. I have to rebuild a daily writing practice and I have to reacquaint myself with the simple little joys of typing words on this keyboard. 

It has always seemed odd to me that a writer has to be an idea-haver and then a kind of story structure architect, someone with the loose whimsy to think up people out of nothing, but then also someone expected to have the self-discipline to sit down and write every day, but then also someone who has the dispassionate bloodlessness to slash and edit their way back through the thick damp word jungle that they themselves grew and tended. It is an odd way to exist. You can barely blame writers for having the reputation of being prodigious drinkers. It is a weird way to spend one’s time and life.

And I have been wildly unsuccessful at it. At least lately.

And yet, here I am on a Wednesday morning before work, typing away. Even when there is no inspiration in the fingertips, it is important to still type away. 

And I have  a few ideas. A precious few, but ideas nonetheless. I’ve been trying to tend to them like the sad, constantly dying herb garden I’ve been trying to grow since the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve had about the same success creating as I’ve had gardening, but the lack of success is not the same as failure; failure is giving up, everything else is just learning.

The other day I read a poem that I liked and it has been stuck in my mind for a while. I have been turning it around like a skillfully cut diamond, trying to appreciate the craft of it. This is what I used to always be doing. It feels good to be doing it again.

 

It is hard for me to dive back into long narrative writing, which was always my home for most of my life. So I have been looking at these smaller things lately. One can produce a small collection of poems in a weekend if one is properly energized. I’m not saying they will be good poems, but I have never concerned myself with that sort of thing. 

And I have a three day weekend coming up.

And I have my first late-pandemic out-of-state trip just days after that. 

And I have hope that those things will produce ideas.

And that those ideas might produce words.

And that those words might become text.

And that that text might become something called “writing” and then I will hold that writing above my head and proclaim, “Behold, I am a writer again!’

And then maybe if I say it, I will feel like it again.

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Thinking on the Life of Lars Larce.

There is a Spanish idiom that goes, “Thinking on the immortality of a crab” and I only learned about it recently, but it has become one of my favorite phrases. It relates to daydreaming and it is a funny way of saying, “I’m not doing nothing, I’m actually deep in contemplation.”

So the usage would be like this:

INT. DAY. LIVING ROOM.

RINALDO is staring passively out a window. Enter MARIA.

MARIA: Rinaldo! You lazy bum! Why are you just sitting there while I am making dinner for the kids?

RINALDO: I’m actually thinking on the immortality of a crab.

MARIA: Well why don’t you do that while you set the table?

RINALDO: Yes, Maria.

MARIA: My mother was right about you.

And scene!

Now, whatever marriage problems Maria and Rinaldo might have are not the topic of this blog post. I am mostly concerned now about daydreaming.

I have spent enough of my life engaged in creative endeavors that I recognize how essential it is to daydream, to ponder and to simply let the mind wander. I’ve had trouble with it the last year or two though and I really do think that it is because of podcasts. 

That seems like a leap, but hear me out. The explosion of podcasts has made it so that whatever your niche interests, you can find a podcast. For instance, the inimitable Glen Weldon of NPR now has a podcast called A Degree Absolute that goes episode by episode through the 1960 British TV show The Prisoner which is the single most insane television program that has ever been produced. And listening to the podcast is absolutely delightful and I love it because it was clearly made for me and like the four other people in existence who would like to see David Lynch make a James Bond movie.

The problem is that my podcast consumption has been increasing substantially over the years and there are some days when I basically don’t even take my earbuds out. There is just SO MUCH information out there to consume! And some of it is good. It is not all bubblegum that I’m listening to. I listen to several daily news pods and numerous wonky policy pods and shows on minimalism and stoicism and history and all kinds of other smart and fancy stuff like that. 

But what I’m not doing much lately is thinking on the immortality of a crab.

Last night I was in bed trying to go to sleep and a name came to me. This is not a terribly unusual thing for a writer and I like odd names, I even keep a list of them. So even though I was warm and comfy under my blankets, I had to roll over and reach for my phone in the dark and that is why this morning I have an email from myself that just says, “Lars Larce”. Now I don’t know who Lars Larce is or what I’m going to do with his name, but at least it did not leave me in the middle of the night, which would have happened otherwise.

As I settled back into bed last night, I realized it had been a long time since I’d had to do that. This was my first Lars Larce in a long time. That makes me sad because when the creative process is really kicking, you are getting Lars Larces all the damn time. A productive writer lives a life drowning in post-it notes that say things like: “The feather is GREEN” or “the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned and so it’s gloomy when they meet.” Stuff like that is common.

But you can’t realize that the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned if you’re not letting your mind wander around in there. You can’t find your way around the arboretum if you’re focused on Glen Weldon talking about the state of BBC Four in 1967. 

I need to find a way to cram more non-time into my life. I need to spend more time thinking on the immortality of a crab. I need to open up some space for more Lars Larces in my life. After all, who is he meeting at the arboretum? Why there? And what’s with the feather? I’m never going to figure it out unless I find some time to.

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To Breakfast Margaritas.

 

So it has been a few days. I told you I was going to have a rough week and let me tell you, a rough week was had.

But I have (so far) survived and now it is Friday and my day should be fairly unexceptional today and that is all I am hoping for.

I should be able to start transitioning back to my normal/better schedule; doing things like this in the morning, working only a 8-hour day, then running and cooking real food in the evening. I’ll need to spend some time really re-tying to devise a way to insulate my life from the invasion of my work life into my personal life. It simply is not acceptable that this keeps happening. I took the job I have for several reasons, but one was specifically because I thought it would fit into a 40 hour week and that has not turned out to be the case. So I may have to reassess some things.

That being said, I don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I recognize that I still have it much easier than lots of people out there in the world, but I also am acknowledging that I have some responsibilities to myself here too. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I’d like to live a life with a baseline somewhere around or slightly above the median quality.” No one is ever going to put that on a t-shirt, nor should they.

How though, do we determine what we do want?

I suppose the answer to that is probably quite easy: we want what we want. You know what you want because it is simply the thing that you want.

That isn’t an entirely satisfying answer though. I mean, it is 7:22 in the morning and what I actually WANT is to be sitting at the roulette table at the El Cortez in Downtown Las Vegas, drinking a breakfast margarita and flirting with the working girls, but I recognize that is not the basis for a good and fulfilling life. So sometimes you can’t really trust what you want. Or at least you can’t trust what that will get you.

Look, I know that in this little blog post this morning I’m not going to come up with a workable framework for determining what constitutes a life worth living, but I suspect this is an iterative process and that the repetition is what makes the progress happen.

So I’ll see you tomorrow.

(Probably not though because tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t usually blog on Saturday, so I will see you Monday. Unless I do somehow end up at the El Cortez by then.)

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I’m sitting here trying to write, but nothing is coming.

This is disheartening.

Between you and me, I was looking at a new Tom Clancy book at the grocery store yeaterday (I’m not convinced that he actually writes them anymore, BTW) and I was all like, “Well I could write this crap.”

I say this while admitting that I used to read a lot of Tom Clancy when I was a young lad (The Hunt For Red October is actually a very good book).

But college has ruined me. Yes, that’s right! Now I sit here and try to think of a story and all I can think about is how bad I am at plot. Oh Plot! Such a contrivance!
But almost every book that anybody ever really cared about has a plot (This is an argueable point, but just fucking go with it, okay?)

So I am sitting here thinking things like:

It should be about a bank! Yes, yes, that’s good. They work for a bank. But there’s some time travel! Yes! That’s good! And also, there’s a scene where the protagonist attempts to bribe a baker! Hilarious! And maybe there is a strip club! Good! And . . . um . . . then something happens in Berlin! In the past! Right! This is great!

And then I look back at my notes and I think to myself, I would love to read that story, but I personally – at this moment – have no idea what it is about.

The creative process, she is so fickle.


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