Here is today’s thingamagig.

It turned out okay, I guess. But my dissatisfaction with what I am producing continues to grow. I am getting tired of exploring form and want to start improving quality, but I am not entirely sure how yet.

I know that I have it in me to turn out top notch quality Web content that is funny, fun, informative, and whatnot, but I feel like I am, at best, stumbling in that vague direction, and that gets frustrating.

I am beginning to wonder, in fact, if I need to take still more time making them so I have enough time to polish and refine each working part until the whole thing runs like Swiss clockwork.

Right now, I am barely managing to put together something that sort of works. And that’s not good enough, not any more. I am tired of mucking about in the sandbox and I want to make something really good.

I suppose I should be more patient with myself and just take a “see how things grow” attitude, but I don’t think I can. I feel like I am in a growth period right now and that’s the time to stretch yourself and reach for the sky.

And what I really want is what I always want, clarity. Clear, concise ideas with simple and effective plans of action leading to a sharp, professional-looking, top notch product that I am proud of when I am done, and can’t want to show people.

Instead, my mind is filled with its usual fog. Part of the price for my creativity, I feel, is this lack of structure within myself. It’s difficult for me to make definite decisions which I then stick with till the end, especially if the process has more than just a few stages.

I want so badly to develop the skills to make truly effective use of my enormous talents. And I am getting there, a little bit more every day.

But the waiting is so damned hard. All my ghosts and demons are crying for release now that the way is opening up, and they all want out at the same time. It’s hard to convince them to pick a number and wait their turn when they have been waiting so long for someone to listen to them.

Oh well, discontent is a vital part of art. The artist goes through cycles of being pleased with their work, then finding flaws in it, then hating their work, then making something better, and being pleased with that for a while, and so forth and so on.

It is a very difficult process emotionally, which is why so many of us creative types are kind of insane. The creativity drives you directions that no sane person who only wanted to go through life in as pleasant a way as possible would ever go.

That goes triple for philosophers. To be a philosopher, you have to follow the truth no matter where the trail leads and ignore the damage you take as your pell-mell pursuit drags you along like a runaway horse.

That’s not how a gentle hedonist lives, and I am learning to make peace with the fact that, pragmatist that I am, there are deep passions within me that have nothing to do with my own comfort, pleasure, and ease, and have everything to do with pursuing things with as little encumbrance as possible and at maximum speed, and hang the consequences.

The strongest of those passions is for the truth, but I also seek beauty, understanding, spiritual growth, and of course, comedy.

To me, these are all, on the hedonistic level, the pursuit of mental pleasure, for me and for others. Of course, there is a lot more than pleasure to the search for truth.

But it is the transcendental and extremely mental joy one feels from those rare but wondrous moments when the truth becomes clear and the rapture of revelation is upon you that keep the beast inside going.

For instance, I have been pondering my strange relationship with my own powers lately, how I both take them for granted and forget they are even there, and I have come to the conclusion that a big part of the problem is that I am quite simply frightened of the power of my own mind.

It just seems so vast and potent and the potential for destruction seems so great and often it really feels like it wants to carry my sanity away in a flood of ego and rage… another case of holding something back because I don’t like where it seems to be leading, I guess.

So perhaps, in order to deal with this fear, I developed the habit of only allowing my mind to develop in ways that are not connected with reality… then I don’t have to take responsibility for them. I don’t even have to own them, not really.

And now, when I try to nudge myself in the direction of a more applied kind of thinking, something that actually would harness my wild talents to reality in a way that improves my life, I end up feeling this terrible panic rising up inside myself that manifests as, for instance, option paralysis.

But it’s really about the fear. The fear that if I really own and use my big big brain, I will end up hurting people, or becoming someone I don’t want to be, or just losing my mind entirely.

I am also, of course, afraid of getting hurt. Trying is, after all, the first step towards failure.

But at this point in my life, I don’t think I am really all that afraid to fail. I don’t expect overnight success. A rejection letter won’t kill my ego.

I think it is more about this strange relationship I have with this massive mind of mine. I have spent a lot time almost ashamed of it because of all the times it is led to my alienation from others.

Maybe it’s tuime to just own it and use it and get used to the feel of it.

Maybe then I could really accomplish something.