Sometimes, the fingers cannot form the shape of the thing in your head: there's too much Tired in the sluice and the trickle of image and imagination comes rusted and sludge.
Which is a nice way of saying: "I'm a little burnt out, and am taking a day."
I'm in the office, which is, these days, a mostly bare room with a beautiful view of leaves and the trees they are attached to and the birds and squirrels that live and play there, and the barren waste of a construction site beyond. The wasteland comes in flits and snatches through the leaves, but it is there, disturbing as a nearly-forgotten memory of loss lurking just beneath the surface of the mind. A sliver of sorrow.
Life, for me, just lately, is Writing a Novel. I don't know how far along into it I am, as far as word count goes, since I'm writing it in notebooks and on my typewriter and in separate MS Word documents broken by section or chapter. A hodge-podge of sheets that grows like mold to my left, on the edge of my desk.
The fact that I'm Writing a Novel is, in large part, the reason that it appears to everyone else like I'm Doing Nothing. I've been talking with Bird a lot about this lately; about the directions I've wandered along over the last couple of years. Mostly, my friends know me as Their Friend Who Podcasts, or Their Friend Who Makes Music (or, Their Friend Who Makes Noise and Calls It Music). But before any of that, all the way back to before I could read, I was a writer. In my dreams of what my life will be one day, and what I want it to be now, I'm a writer. That's all. It's what I care about, and what I'm passionate about, and what makes me most happy in the world, and I've wandered a long, long way away from it lately, filling the scant time I have with projects in other media. It's cost me some command of my words, and a fluency and fluidity at the keyboard that I once had, and am struggling to recapture, now.
That said, I'm not going to stop the other stuff. I'm not sure how I'll fit it all in, Chat-Man and Robin and Measuring Flicks and the like, but I can't stop those conversations: they're too much fun, and I learn too much about conversations and art and people, and I've made too many friends too closely, in front of the microphones, to ever stop sitting down in front of them, I think.
I don't know how I'll manage it, but I'm going to try.
I meant to write about Hoopla, though, and libraries. Sorry. Got off-track. I've noticed, when I sit down to write these, that I often apologize or make excuses for not doing things. For not journaling more regularly, or for not putting out podcasts, or for not generating enough content. And lately, I've felt less and less comfortable with the discomfort of that space, and yearned to get back to the singular struggle of putting words on a page. Of making up stories and writing them down. Crafting poems. Imagining film scripts. Putting words in word balloons and in the mouths of people who Enter Stage Left in my head, words that matter and mean things to me and make me think about what I think and wonder at what sorts of things I wonder at.
David McCullough said, "Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly."
Then he added, "That's why it's so hard."
And I wonder if that's why I've been so tired, lately, so muddle-headed and foggy and filled with lassitude. I've spent my life thinking on paper. It's where I explore my head and my heart, and it is so hard.
This past month, working in earnest again on this novel, refocusing my energy on making up things and people and conversations, imagining murders and sex and conspiracies and nightmares that end only when you close your eyes and sleep, and putting it all down on paper... It's been great. I wake up happy, looking forward to working on the book. I go to sleep content, having worked on the book, and (mostly) knowing what happens next, and thinking about how best to get it down the next morning.
I'm not sure what the point of all this is. Maybe to generate content, though I hope not. I hope what I'm doing now is saying hello, and telling people who haven't seen or heard from me in awhile what I've been up to, and that I'm alright. Happy as a clam. A bit tired (it's the week of the Traverse City Film Festival, as I write this, which brings its own bags of shit along with it, mostly in the form of bad driving, public drunkenness and violence--I called the police yesterday, walking home from work, because I saw a woman assaulted in an alley: she got away after a few seconds, and made it to the main thoroughfare of the city, where there were lots of people, and where she was safe, but I still called to report it, and describe the man who attacked her. Summer in Traverse City is not all sunshine and cherry pits. It brings a lot of people with it, and not all of them are happy, kind, and considerate. Most are, but not all.)
All that said, I'm cutting the first two August episodes of Measuring Flicks tomorrow morning, along with a Patreon-exclusive two-parter: Karl and Danielle (gifted thespian, wunderkind theater tech, and Karl's girlfriend) came over and, over the course of a full day, much tequila was drunk, many charcoal-grilled chicken tacos were consumed, and both versions of House of Wax (the one where Vincent Price is amazing, and the one where Paris Hilton ends up dead) were watched and discussed in boisterous, happy round-table fashion. It was such fun.
And that's what life has been like for me, for the past month or so: fun. Mostly good. Mostly happy. Mostly productive.
(P.S. - I meant to write about Laurie Anderson's stunning new album with Kronos Quartet, Landfall, and to list all the reasons you should go listen to it, and about libraries, and G.K. Chesterton, and Warren Ellis, and Hoopla, and Murder, She Wrote and Miss Marple and Shetland and all sorts of other things, but I wrote a bunch of other stuff instead, and so am leaving this postscript to remind myself to get back to these subjects next time round. I hope you'll indulge me.)