Gasoline

Sometimes I wonder what it is about writing that makes it such a big deal for me.

 What I mean is why have I spent so much time avoiding it if I like it so much, if I find such satisfaction in the process of doing it, and if it does so much good for me?

 I like every piece of writing that I am able to finish in the hours that I have taken to do that exact thing. Writing it feels good, and so does reading it, so why not do it all the time? I think I’ll probably come around to that, but I just haven’t made the habit of it yet. My habit, if you can call it that, has been to write only when I simply cannot do anything else, when ‘the spirit takes me’, and that’s not a super wonderful strategy if what I want to be is a writer.

 There are two reasons for this; one reason is that, for me at least, inspiration resides in the hip sack of crisis. So that means when I’m suffering the most, I hear the call to pencil. The problem usually is that I’m too busy suffering to find one, or to make the time to sit down, or if I am, IT often just all goes away as soon as I have a blank page in front of me. Poof! It’s gone. My words, collected and arrayed so perfectly in my mind, break apart and vanish.

 Have you ever seen gasoline on the water? It’s beautiful. There’s nothing like it, the stunning array of colour, the unique sheen, on water, but not water, like how lorem ipsum is letters, but is not writing. Sitting down to capture inspiration is like spraying detergent on that water borne gasoline, the reaction is immediate, and the disintegration is, apparently, complete. It’s gone, and all I am left with is gobbets of diction mixing in the currents that I cannot ever stop. What I was hoping for was that oh so rare boon of a successful artstrike, like lightening that doesn’t kill you, and makes a great story, but what I receive is what you get when you drop the toaster in the bath water, predictable, wildly exciting for a bit, and then ultimately disappointing, when what I need, is only light.

Flick.

Now I can see.

No breaking toes and dropping shit, no wild uncertainty about being alone in the room, no “what’s that sound?”. No. You can see the path to the closet because you paid your electrical bill, and the path is clear because you put shit away, and she’s still there because you make her feel safe, none of which are the results of hope or inspiration. These are not accidents. These are the results of daily contemplation and practice. For years. These are the outcomes of endurance through pain, and courage through the loss of self, of vision that enables sight through the fog of positive disintegration, and persistence enough to bring all those little droplets back together, reversing entropy, into the shape that you want to be, that you are. In truth.

You don’t want to be the sheen on the water. You want to be the water.

 I inevitably hear Bruce Lee’s voice when I say shit like that. He was a major influence on me, an inspiration, but I never actually absorbed and appreciated that what he did was work his ass off in service to his vision. He literally worked himself to death, so that’s not what I want, but he burned so bright that he changed the world. Bruce Lee didn’t wait for inspiration, he didn’t wait for anything, not even the end of his life. That’s his thing, though, and the point is not that I want to be like Bruce Lee, the point is that I need to be doing MY thing, and my thing is not to be found in the waiting. There is nothing to be found in the waiting but disappointment.

 I said there are two reasons, but I can’t remember what the other one is. Maybe I’ve covered it. One thing I will say, though, and maybe it was some raveling of this thread, daily practice prepares you for an appropriate response to inspiration, because inspiration is good, it’s very good, but it’s a gift that you will just drop and step on if you aren’t prepared to handle it.

It’s an egg.

I lose my train of thought when I grab the pencil because the pencil is a stranger to me. Sure, I carry one around all the time, and I also carry notebooks, but they are the same pencil, and the same notebooks that I have been carrying around for years. I haven’t used them.

I keep buying them, I have lots of them, but hope and waiting don’t grind graphite.