Monday, February 1, 2010

Beginning near the beginning...

It has to start somewhere. Like a crash at a busy intersection, it is inevitable. It’s just about when. And how much damage it will do. And how much it will hurt.

See, I have this push-pull thing about writing. Sometimes I think I am lazy. Other times, I just know I’m a bad storyteller. An OK writer, sure, but that’s like an OK singer without a song.

But if I don’t start to put something, anything, down on paper NOW – even digital “paper” though it might be – I will never start. And if I never start, I will know what a fraud I have been all along. Being creative, even in one’s own mind, springs from the creation itself, not just thinking creatively. So, doofuss, create. It ain’t creative if it ain’t created.

But what?

Hmmmmmm. Nothing to write. OK then, they always say write about what you do or did.  So, what about my day?

List of Shit I did today.
• Made the bed
• Cleaned shirts out of my closet
• Did Dishes
• Some laundry
• Went to two banks for deposits
• Renewed my library card
• Went to Best Buy looking for printers and speaker stands
• Ate a low-carb Thickburger
• Went to Sam’s Club for water and fruit
• Went to Krogers
• Went to Marshall’s and bought a slick chrome wastebasket for the condo
• Went to the cleaners
• Did email
• Read a little
• Started a blog
• Stared into space

There, that takes me up to five o’clock!

How to turn all this potential energy into kinetic energy…that’s just what I’m trying to figure out. Maybe I am trying too hard. I have this, um, constipation of creativity and I am trying to shit out all of the words and phrases and alliterations and parables and homonyms and antonyms and prodigious prose ALL AT ONCE.

So, as a wise woman once said to me at some family gathering, where I, impatient as usual and with intent to get those people just doing something besides jawing about whatever it was, with a certain amount of malice in her voice as she gave me the eyeball-roll, “Will you just go with the flow for God’s sake?”

It is soooo hard to back off sometimes.


Tomorrow: "Prayer Flags..."

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