fuck it

in

After 30+ years in some form of creative practice, the only lesson I’ve learned worth passing on is that the magic words are “fuck it” – as in “fuck it, I’m going to The Shed and freeze and fiddle with things,” or “fuck it, I have no clue what I’m doing so (so - not but!) I’m going to do it anyhow because that’s the only way to learn”: this magical refrain being what drew me out of the past few days’ creative stupor (nice to see that posting here again with regularity and verbosity wasn’t solely because of the stupor) to the point that maybe, just maybe I have the start of something worth pursuing that makes use of all those flat metal rods that I cut for another project before deciding to go in a different direction (fuck it), flat metal rods which have, for the last week, been sitting on the workbench with the nine-inch-ish flat metal rod equivalent of a middle finger pointing in my general direction and sneering.

arctic processing

in

Arctic blast continues its arctic blasting amidst mountains of shoveled snow and my patience for being creatively empty (brought mostly by it being too fucking cold in The Shed to think how I like to think – staring at random scraps of metal (or paper, or words) without a single notion of what I’m going to make until a semblance of potential comes to mind – for more than two minutes at a time) is at a low ebb. While it’s nice that I can occupy myself with writing things for this space and making my way through Stone and Chester drum exercises, I’d much rather be out there making shit without plans and batches and/oh hell I’m just being a bitchy old grump this morning.

While Ann Lamott would tell us that being creatively empty is a chance to fill up again, how, exactly, to refill that empty has been and continues to be the question: the ways that used to work no longer work. Perhaps these postings are part of that refilling?