Art requires patience. Everyone knows this.

But in a sense, I only figured this out for myself relatively recently. My lack of patience when it comes to creation is a severely limiting factor on the quality of said creations, and I can no longer pretend like that’s no big deal.

Like I have said before (I think), creativity burns inside me. Once I get the creative juices flowing, the fuse is lit and the fire is burning and I am filled with the desire for release.

So yeah. It’s a lot like sex. Or rather, masturbation.

And my problem, not to be too gross about this, is premature ejaculation. The big release doesn’t happen till I complete the thing I am working on, and this wild impatience of mine makes me all fired up to get there as soon as possible.

Hey…. fire imagery!

Obviously, such haste is inimical to quality. I get by, but no matter how you slice it, my work tends to be quite rough. Whether it’s a blog entry or a video or a minute of music, I am working against the clock.

What I really fear is the fire going out. It’s happened to me before. I have lost the fire in the middle of doing something creative and hence lost the thread, so to speak. And then I have to stop because anything else would be just going through the motions and I refuse (so far) to do that.

For me, unfelt art is not worth doing. It has to be alive and vibrant or I might as well be typing “all work and no play makes Fru a bad playwright) over and over again till I fill up the Internet.

I realize that makes me sound a tad precious, maybe even spoiled, but that’s the way it has to be. Creativity like mine comes from a deep sensitivity that acts on many levels, and some of those levels don’t necessarily make sense, but they are what they are and there’s not a lot I can do about that.

My muse, ladies and gentleman. She’s in charge. I just work here.

This burning impatience also leads to my crippling unwillingness to go back to something I have “finished” in order to make it better. My need for creative release demands acts of pure creation, not rehashing something I have completed. The very idea of going back to something after my mind has labeled it “done” makes me feel nauseous. Why would I want to go back to something old and dead when what I really want is to do things that are fresh and new!

So I end up pushing my creations out the door as soon as they are fully formed, then I lock the door from the inside.

I know how it should be. I should be able to tame that muse of mine well enough to harness those flames of creation and use them to drive an engine that can move me further and slower. And with more power.

But I don’t know if that is even possible. I’m addicted to the rapid burn. The very idea of slowing that down makes me want to weep from sheer impatience. Slower? If anything, I want it to be faster. I’m barely holding my fudge as it is!

So instead of slowing the process down, I have made it deeper and broader. More of my energies go into writing my little diary entries of mine than ever before, and I hope to eventually get to the point where it takes my all.

Maybe then I can make art that is truly worth something. Right now, I feel like I just dabble. My lack of a reverse gear means my output is brilliant but messy and I feel like it can be hard to see the shine under the sloppiness.

It’s not what I want for myself as a creator. I want to present the world with beautifully cut gems of art, not rough uncut stones still embedded in the ore.

Here’s a hunk of mud. I swear it has jewels in it somewhere, really good ones! You’ll just have to dig around for them. I couldn’t be bothered. I sure hope you don’t find that, say, incredibly insulting. That would suck, I guess.

Still… it’s your fault I’m not a rich and famous author yet! After all, you’re the one who couldn’t see my unparalleled brilliance which should be evident to all of sensate creation through the big pile of mud I dumped on your desk.

Oh, who am I kidding. It’s shit.

I can only hope that as I age, taming the muse will become easier because I will become less impatient. I’ll be able to finally slip that harness on her and ride her to where I want to go instead of helplessly trailing behind her.

The view’s better from above.

In theory, there could be a superior creative outlet for me, one I have never even thought of, which could increase the density of my output to the point where it uses all the wild horses I can rein to it. I have no idea what that would be, but who knows, maybe it’s lurking out there for me to discover it.

And maybe I am being too hard on myself. Maybe my output isn’t as intolerably sloppy as I feel it is, and it actually is good enough for some editor or other gatekeeper to see the jewels shining in the muck.

Of course, I will never learn the truth until I start sending my stuff to editors and whatnot, and just like that, we are back at where we always end up. Looking at that wall between me and the outside world, and trying to work up the nerve to build a door into it. Leave my safe little matchbox of a world long enough to at least leave one of my babies on the doorstep of someone I think will treat it well.

Or at least tell me what I need to do in order to make it adoptable.

That metaphor gut weird real fast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

There’s been a lot of fear in my life for someone whose life has been relatively without danger.

Well, there was the bullying. I guess that’s where I learned fear, real fear. As you all know (quite well) by now, I was severely bullied in elementary school. I lived in fear of my classmates, every single one of them, because none of them were safe to be around from my point of view. Even the ones who seemed really nice, and there were some, were a source of danger because trying to interact with them always ended up in confusion and awkwardness.

And for some reason, I always blamed myself for that. I had this desperate desire to connect others because I was so lonely. Mp friends, no attention at home, teachers that barely tolerated me…. damned right I was lonely.

And somehow, this desperate desire to connect caused me to always blame myself and feel like there was something wrong with me when the lack of connection and awkwardness punished me once again for trying to relate.

It hurt so bad. I wanted to reach out to people and be included, but instead, this enormous gulf between me and them opened up and made me feel lonelier than ever. Made me feel like I was disgusting alien insect who should just scuttle back into the darkness where I belonged.

Perhaps it’s thing drive to connect that kept me from embracing the solitary life like so many before me. A lot of people in the position I was in simply say “Well then, people suck. Fuck people. ” and retreat into some intellectual pursuit like science or art or building things or programming. They make peace with their lone star status and, in effect, stop trying, and maybe even stop caring about it.

But I don’t feel like that was ever in the cards for me. I could stop trying, but I could not stop caring. Even as I type this, I desperately want people’s affection and approval. I want to feel the warmth of human connection, whether it’s through cuddling or applause. I want to make people happy, and see that happiness in their faces, and know I put it there.

And there is no chance of that ever going away, although if somehow my loneliness was pierced and destroyed, I can only assume it would grow a lot less acute.

Right now, I am a starving man. A thirsty dog. My life currently gives me barely enough to survive. That’s not the fault of anyone in my life, I assure you. It’s because the need is so massive that it would take more than what my life current offers to make a serious dent in it.

And I am so very numb all that time that what light and warmth is in my life is barely felt.

Loneliness eats away at you, I guess. Human beings have a lot of social needs, and I have spent my entire life, since my very first day of school, meeting almost none of them. No status, no friendship, no peer acceptance, no romance.

Just TV, video games, and books.

But maybe it was there all along and I just couldn’t feel it. I will freely admit that maybe I have a busted antenna when it comes to receiving positive social stimuli. Maybe all those years of childhood terror and loneliness caused some very vital part of my emotional/social equipment to atrophy and that’s why it seems to me now that it would take something pretty amazing to penetrate all that ice around my heart.

And yet, I feel like it’s definitely possible. I have a very strong feeling that the right person or circumstance (or both) could crack the ice and let the sun shine in to my cold and lonely heart.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what that magic key to my ice palace might be. The right sort of peer group, perhaps, or community. Or the right man who can put up with my eccentricities long enough for me to grow to trust them and open up to them. Let them see the pain beneath the smile, and see if they stick around.

If you can survive exposure to my radioactive core, then maybe I can trust that you won’t run away when things stop being light and fun and silly and cuddly. I have a terrible fear that nobody could love me if they really got to know me, if they got too close to me.

I understand a lot of people feel the same. We’re such a fucked up society.

The right person could prove me wrong. That would mean a lot to me. So would an environment where I feel like I can help out and be part of everything, instead of feeling like a clumsy and unwanted burden.

I have a lot of magic in me. I can do amazing things. Things that are unaffected by my weird eyesight and general clumsiness. I could be a real asset… somewhere.

The trick is that they have to be willing to see past my twenty year gap in job history and recognize that I have a lot of talent just waiting to find a use and make them proud (and money).

Volunteering has been mentioned as a cure for my condition. And I am sure it is. I can imagine that if I volunteered somewhere, it would go a long way towards my feeling less useless and more like there is some kind of point to my life besides consuming food and media till the day I die.

But I would have to get over a mountain of social anxiety in order to get there. A very deep part of me would be terrified that whatever the organization was, I would just end up getting rejected and excluded and that would lead to me feeling incompetent and unwelcome all over again.

Only worse, because now I have more proof.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.