happy / done?

in

Two notions duking it out across brainmatter battlefield:

One, that I'm happy writing what I'm writing and publishing it the way I do. No interest in aspiring to go beyond short things and experiments published to newsletters and zines. Aspiration pointed only towards increasing the quality of the work.

And yet:

Two, the emptiness I've felt around most aspects of my life and self at one point or another has, as of this pondering, consumed nearly all aspects and, for the first time since I left music school 20 years ago, seeped into the one area I didn't think it could: Am I writing now only because I haven't a clue what else to do with myself? Or because the alternative, not writing, is too scary to fathom? Is there something else I should be doing and if so, is the only way to find it to stop writing?

Synthesis(?): while I'm about 98% certain that writing will remain part of whatever the new normal shapes up to be (and that notion one will win out), that two percent is – or, rather, I'm in a state of mind where that two percent is – compelling, perhaps dangerously so. Likely cause: utter exhaustion.

Duly recorded here solely as a reflection of the current status of my process of processing.

being my anything written

in

The empty continues and I've returned to this, especially today:

"The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck when the truth is that you're empty... (but) if you accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you free yourself to begin filling up again."

Lamott then adds, "I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing... ": these morning pieces are, as they have always been (I see now) in their way – some with more urgency than others – my anythings written.

Glimmer of hope, perhaps? I'll take what I can get.

Also: might have stumbled into something resembling if not acceptance then at least resignation – what's the difference between the two, I once asked my therapist; (shrug guy emoji), he replied): I don't necessarily feel better about it or less terrified (oh, those things I attach to my ability to put words to page) but I'm seeing the empty, dry well for what it is: an empty well.

That said, the question remains, as it long has, of how to fill the dried well back up. What brings me joy, a friend asked: my Switch, for one; the other, I realize now, is entering that period of, if not flow, then that time when the thing you've agonized over reveals the simplicity of its required realization (simple ≠ easy).

You may consider anything to have been written.

phantoms of swallowed sand

in

Week ends/begins as it ended/began, the brick wall ctd: simultaneous shock, resignation, and pervasive weariness over total stalling out on all creative fronts: neck deep (at least for the last few days) in that feared state which Isabel Allende likens to "swallowing sand," though my only point of reference is the "eat a spoonful of cinnamon" test/dare/internet thing from a decade or so back because I did it and have an experiential knowledge from days young and stupid.

Maybe I'm simply worn out from trying to break through again, from pounding a little harder against that diamond brick wall from Capaldi's best episode of DOCTOR WHO, my hands bleeding, my brain on something that passes barely for autopilot.

Rewatched, for the umpteenth time – though my first in probably 20 years (and K's first time – and her first silent film) – the 1925 Lon Chaney / Mary Philbin PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and, of all the times I've seen it, I think this may have been the first time I've seen it with the technicolor Red Death sequence; planning to pick through some of the extras – especially the bits from the 1930 sound version – that Kino's latest beautful Blu version gifted.

Unrelated though no less important: I am now in possession of a high-powered electric leafblower: beware, zombie-leaf horde, for I will now vanquish you without melting an icecap.