Not sure what I want to write about right now. But I have confidence that if I just start writing, something will emerge.
I could have decided that I just wasn’t “feeling it” right now and punt this task into the future, but that would have been lame.
Fuck waiting until you are inspired. Create with whatever is in your head right now. Don’t wait for some bullshit magical “moment”. That’s just procrastination talking.
Unless you know, for a fact, that when this magic moment comes, you will drop everything and pounce on the inspiration and use it till its fullest to GET SHIT DONE, you’re just lying to yourself.
I mean seriously…. has that ever actually happened? Have you ever been struck with inspiration and dashed to your computer (or easel, or whatever) and created something wonderful with that energy?
As far as I can tell, procrastination is the number one enemy of art. It’s always easiest to think of all the wonderful art you will create “some day”,even though you haven’t made the slightest move towards doing anything for a long long time.
I call this the “horizon effect”, because doing your art is always sitting there comfortably on the horizon, reassuringly constant in how it always stays the exactly same distance in time away – not so far as to seem like forever away, but not so close that it actually feels like you will actually do it any time soon.
Because actually doing it is hard, and scary, and stressful, and there are always millions of easier, lower effort, higher reward things you could be doing.
So no, you will just wait for the mythical day when creating art becomes easier and more fun that watching Netflix or eating a donut.
Aaaany day now.
That’s why I often say to myself, “the only way to do it is to do it”.
It seems like a tautology, as if I am saying “the only way for it to be white is if white is its color” or something similarly foolish.
But you’d be amazed at how easy it is to get caught up in doing everything about your art except actually doing it, and then end up wondering why that isn’t working.
So do it. Choose to do the harder thing that is less immediately rewarding. Do the thing that takes actual effort instead of just doing whatever is easiest.
Because until you can do that, you are not an artist.
You’re just someone with nice thoughts about yourself.
Of course, I am in a sense talking to myself here. But not about the whole “actually doing it” point of view. In point of fact, I am doing it right now.
So I can be smugly superior about that.
But it never really goes anywhere. I know I have the talent to be a really great writer but none of that matters because I haven’t been able to work up the nerve to put my work in front of any kind of gatekeepers, or even a broader audience.
For me, the making of the art is easy. I’m a creator. I love to create.
It’s what happens after that has me stumped.
More after the break.
I know the minute Christmas is over, I will think of a million things I will wish I had done and be filled with regret.
Doesn’t move me to do anything about it now, though.
At the mercy of the tides
Pretty depressed right now. But I don’t care.
Because it’s all just chemical bullshit anyway. The dark tide has risen within me and so now I am stuck feeling small and helpless and cold and I am just sooooo over this.
Whatever, brain. I will wait out the storm and when the holy morn breaks I will pick up the pieces and move on and you will have accomplished absolutely nothing.
It’s just the weather.
Speaking of music, I thought of another song that speaks to that deep part of me.
But you don’t have the discipline
Like Eye in the Sky by the Alan Parsons Project, it expresses my very strange and spooky kind of anger.
So to me, it all makes perfect sense. And it sounds like the sort of thing I might write if I wanted to warn someone who had wronged me that I was coming for them.
And, admittedly, if I was less concerned about being accessible and/or being liked. I have great respect for the poets and other artists who simply express what they need to express without worrying about whether people will “get it” or not.
I have too great a need to communicate for that. But as you all know, I am getting better about that. I quite often express myself in poetic terms in this blog.
Were I a trifle bolder, I might even get into actual poetry. Show up at poetry open mic type events, lay my words out plain and unbolded for the people, and then leave people to make of it what they will.
Those are the dark truths of a lonely shadow. The tawdry secrets and cheap little baubles that I bring back as mementos and tiny treasures from my trips into the deeper darkness of my soul.
Darkness can scream
And silence can bleed
And isolation can make ivory towers crumble into ruin
See? I’d make a great poet. That shit’s impressive, y’all.
And I mean every word of it, too. There is much in me that can’t be expressed in ordinary language. Even by someone with my skills and versatility. Imagistic poetic language is the only kind that comes close to being able to express what I need to express, and even then I feel like i am only making faint sketches of the beautiful dreams and dark machines inside me.
It would be amusing if I became a poet. I have avoided it for a long time because I thought there was no money in it.
But it’s not like I am making mad bank with my current lifestyle either.
I will think about it as I nap.
And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.