In a thoughtful mood tonight. Not depressed and frustrated, like yesterday, thank goodness. Doing the emotional emesis trick worked it usual cleansing magic and I feel a lot better today than I did last night.

But I am still feeling pensive and introspective. It is a mood best suited for quiet reflection and exploring one’s inner realm, making a firmer connection between mind and self, and letting long-delayed processes bloom into the empty space freed by your quietude.

And that would be great, if it wasn’t Halloween night. Don’t get me wrong. I love Halloween, despite being an agoraphobic diabetic. I love any holiday that encourages people to express themselves by dressing up and letting their hair down and letting their freak flag fly.

Sure, it’s a little sad that more people can’t be who they want to be every day of the year, as Jello Biafra makes clear in this song.

But I am a more forgiving and understanding person than JB. I get that not everyone can just be a big flaming freakwad with no hesitation and no regrets. So I understand.

And I love fireworks. Fireworks rock my world. They are an amazing thing. Sometimes I wonder at how relatively casually we treat them. It makes big shiny things in the sky! The whole freaking sky! That’s some serious mojo working there. Total tribal magic of the highest order.

So I love Halloween and I love fireworks, but I don’t like them combined.

What some of you might not know is that, somehow, here on the West Coast, they have the crazy idea that fireworks are for Halloween, too.

And that wouldn’t be a problem either, except that because Washington State is so near and they will sell fireworks to absolutely anybody, the fireworks festivities are not limited to nice, well organized displays at public events where everyone can either choose to participate or stay the heck home.

Oh no. That would be remarkably like civilization. Instead, any library mumbler with a Zippo can have their own show, and as a result of that, I get to have very loud explosions going off at random times seemingly right outside my window all night.

This overstimulated my poor introvert’s nerves to the point of something approaching shell shock.

Now I would never dream of peeing on anyone’s parade by telling them they can’t have fun. Nobody wants to be That Guy, the party pooper, the cranky complainer.

But I draw the line when it involves loud noises, whether they be brief and intense, or long term and moderate, like when someone is playing their music too loud.

Their right to make loud noises end when I am trying to sleep or relax. We all have the freedom to do as we please but only if it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others.

Modern life plays a funny game of convincing us how we are all independent individuals with so much freedom, and yet we have never lived around so many others before and thus been limited by their needs.

There is also this : I would really rather people had fun in a way that does not involve any old rube using fiery explosives anywhere and anyhow he goddamn well wants. We’re just lucky this is a damp climate, because if not, every Halloween would burn the whole damned place down.

We are one dry autumn away from oblivion.

So I am just plain not keen on this whole “Halloween = fireworks” bullshit. Whatever happened to needing a license to do this shit?

But still, um… calm. Thoughtful. Introspective. Zen. The fireworks seem to be over for now, so I can… relax.

That’s probably why I ended up doing a video like this one tonight.

I had the idea for that vid in my idea file for a while before finally feeling like making it tonight. Art works out that way sometimes. There is the brilliant idea, and there is the time to execute it, but those are not necessarily coincidental at all.

That’s why writing these things down is so important. You can have the idea, put it in the file, forget about it, then some day in the future, you will be looking through your ideas file and something will just click, and you will say “That’s the one. That’s the one I am doing tonight. ”

We creative types are all worshipers of the same deity : our muse. And one of the most important things to learn about creativity is that you will get nowhere by trying to force your muse to conform to your ideas of how you think creativity SHOULD work.

That bird does not sing when caged. You have to be willing to submit to its will and do things the way it wants to do them, and then you get the really good results.

This becomes particularly troublesome when your “religion” has to deal with the outside world, and its incessant demands that you do things its way.

We creatives are but acolytes to the religion of our muse. We learn the rituals and the rites over time, but we no more understand why they work than a mystic shaman understands whether it’s the herbs or the chanting or the dance that drives the illness from a tribesman’s body.

So when we say “It just doesn’t work that way!”, we don’t know why that is any more than you do.

Don’t ask us, we just work here.

Now myself, I am constantly overflowing with creativity, and so far, that has always been enough. I have never run out of ideas. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have so many ideas that it can be quite overwhelming.

And so I am quite confident that, even though I will be starting a 50,000 word novel tomorrow with only a vague outline in my head of what will go into it, I am not worried.

Whether it’s a novel or a book of short stories, I am quite confident that I can do it.

I mean come on, it’s only 1667 words a day!