I was working on yesterday's DOSE and crashed my creative bus into a tree.
That's a little melodramatic, but the metaphor serves my current purpose.
Although crafting these daily injections has thus far been unexpectedly time consuming, they've also been fun to create. They flowed pretty freely out of me, without too much intellectual over-baking on my part. All cylinders are firing, and the gears are well lubricated.
More importantly though, there has been a strong feeling of play in the act of sitting down, thinking of a topic, and then physically putting finger tips to key pad.
I'm a horrible typist, having never properly learned the skill. All the doses are typed with a maximum of four fingers, which is just the right rate of speed for my brain to "type it as it comes". As stated in song and in the missives, I'm a "Slow Driving Man". I get there, but I savor the ride.
I don't really "think" when I'm writing, or if I am, it's a different type of thinking that I'm normally used to when trying to create something out of nothing through music or visual arts.
There is very little editing done before I post these things, of which many "real writers" have advised me that maybe I should think about developing that skill set along with my painfully inept typing abilities.
Basically, after writing the prose, I spellcheck it and clean it up by removing over-used commas and eliminate the use of "So", "But","Anyways" and "And" at the beginning of every paragraph (an annoying recurring habit that I'm noticing), pick out the purdy pictures or videos off the googly intrawebs, assemble the thing and click the "Publish" button.
Voila! Whether a rabbit, a bear, a lion or a rhino, something fun to write always comes out of the hat.
Then its up to the rest of you readers to determine whether it lives or dies. Once I kick them out of the nest, it's time to assemble a new bird for the next day's
boot.
If they read like I would speak it in my voice in real time, that's good enough for me. So far, I feel I've achieved that.
I was thinking about influences again yesterday, but specifically works of art that had a profound effect on my own conceptualization processes past, present and future, and decided to write about the use of allegory in "The Wizard of Oz", both the original book and the iconic film of 1939.
Fun, right?
Timing is everything in life, and so are environmental factors. Due to the massive amount of yummy and delicious Saranac Brewery products consumed at a Grace Potter and The Nocturnals show Saturday night, and the resultant annihilation of what precious functioning brain cells I still have in the storehouse at age 51, yesterday I discovered that writing with a screaming hangover is not something I'm interested in exploring ever again.
I was kind of disappointed with the show last night. The Nocturnals really impressed me the last few times I saw them, but this time not so much. They didn't really hit their stride until the third act of their set, usually set in motion with their killer rendition of The Jefferson Airplane classic, "White Rabbit".
What transpired before that point seemed to be more of a showcase of their hair flipping abilities and histrionic rock star posing. Admittedly, they are very good at histrionic posing and hairflipping, but that only goes so far with me these days.
Maybe The Nocturnal's cover of "White Rabbit" was an omen of what I was going to end up with on creative terms come Sunday. Today's effort only resulted in me falling down a rabbit hole, and the end result had to be scrapped.
It wasn't fun, or written in the spirit of play. It read like a term paper. More accurately, it read like an intellectual hair flip.
It just didn't meet the standards that I have set for myself or The Daily Dose. Sometimes you have to pull the plug, and go back to the drawing board.
Even now, just as I'm pain free and getting my flow back, there's a neighborhood wide power outage and I'm writing by the light of the laptop screen at 3 am on Monday morning.
The Gods just aren't cooperating on any level and there is no use in trying to fight them. I am laying down my creative sword as I to live to fight another day.
I did learn some things today about myself as I researched the life of L. Frank Baum and the process of creating the movie, so today wasn't a total bust. I'll eventually crack that nut in a future post.
I thought I was a self cloistered guy padding around in my apartment wearing pink bunny slippers, trying to make stuff out of my mind and then share it with friends while occasionally taking a break to play with my puppies.
But according to some, my love of the allegory in OZ makes me a Gay-Sodomite-Satanic-Mass Manipulator-New-World-Order-Illuminati- Mind Fucker. Unbenowenst to me, I'm a Theophist, an Occultist, and Godless worshipper of Baphomet and Lady Ga Ga.
Who knew? I certainly didn't! Nobody has taught me the secret handshake yet, anyway.
As I've advised in previous blogs: Always look for the harvestable material, even if your harvesting it from a mangled ball of physical, emotional, spiritual or creative wreckage. There is always something to save and something to learn from the experience of "doing", "making", and "sharing".
You take the wheel, you try to keep it on the road and between the guardrails for the most part.
When you're trying to yank something out of the air or out of your ass and make something out of nothing, you will have to break the rules of the road. You will sometimes crash the bus if your driving it like Sandra Bullock in "Speed".So I apologize for letting you all down today if I have.
When you get high, you crash. What comes up, will come down. I guess what might have been fun turned into a lesson in Newtonian Law.
This was the subject matter of the very first Daily Dose, and after thirty shots, I found myself at the bottom of the creative sine wave.
All that means is there I'm at the starting point of the upward ramp. The Dose Project is a marathon, not a sprint.
I'm reminded of the old joke where the father bull alternately advised his eager young son and charge, "Instead of running down the hill to the point of exhaustion, lets reserve our energy, walk down the hill and be at full strength when we reach the herd of cows... and widen the scope of your original agenda point, son".
In other words, don't run to fuck one, walk and fuck 'em all.
The power just got restored, and the lights came back on.
Today, I walk toward the cows instead of dashing directly to one.
See you tomorrow, Peep-A-Roos. I'm going back to bed.
"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.
I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.
The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"
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THANK YOU KINDLY,
COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"
1 comment:
In college, I pulled an all-nighter studying for a mid-term in a government course. Amongst the topics were the agrarian populist movement in America (late 1800's to early 1900's) After I got back from the exam, totally fried from no sleep, I mentioned the test to a friend and he said: "you didn't have to study--populism is just The Wizard of Oz." He gave me a long breakdown with each character and I thought, in my brain-addled state that it made perfect sense. I'm not so sure anymore--but I always tell people that anyway (on the EXTREMELY rare occasions that the topic may pop up!)
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