One thousand miles

As of today, I’ve ridden 1000 miles on the bike this year. That’s a little farther than the distance between Boston and Louisville! (Swami has me beat, though, with almost 1200—that’s Boston to Birmingham, Alabama.) And since it’s getting damn cold now, I probably won’t get too many more miles in for 2007. Next year, the goal is to ride a metric century (62.14 miles); this year’s longest ride was the Hub on Wheels at 41, so the goal is 50% farther. No problem, right?

Nice view

Here are two pics from a recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, both taken from the parking lot at the top of Mt. Mitchell. It’s the highest mountain east of the Mississippi.

How high is it exactly, you might ask?

Creativity, where is thy muse

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity recently, because I’ve been in what feels like a slump on and off for the last year or so, and also because I just read Sandman: Dream Country. One of the short stories in that collection (“Calliope”) deals with the creative muse and writer’s block.

But I should elaborate on both of those reasons. The first reason might seem surprising, because it’s not like I haven’t been writing. The prime exhibit is this blog, which does count as writing, even if it doesn’t all necessarily count as entertaining writing. But it’s not like I’ve been staring at blank screens nonstop for the last year. What kills me, though, is that I had a taste of real inspiration, where I sat down and banged out a scene-by-scene plot for a story over the course of just a few minutes, a plot which sprang so fully formed out of my head that I was able to actually produce a complete work once I filled in the structure. This is in stark contrast to the rest of my fiction writing, where I have probably finished less than 1 percent of everything I’ve started.

So now that I’ve experienced one time where it was blissfully easy, really paint-by-numbers easy, I want to feel that again. But of course it hasn’t happened, and I wonder if it will ever happen again. I’d better be satisfied even if it doesn’t, you know? It’s a damn lucky thing, damn lucky.

Then, reading Sandman, I wonder how it is even possible to live entirely based on one’s own creativity. Anyone who writes anything, from novelists to people trying to put together an email in their cubicle, knows that many times it’s just a brutal slog to get something down. But to think that the result of that slog could be the difference between the success and failure of one’s livelihood, well, that would be a crushing responsibility. I suppose that right there explains the impetus behind works like “Calliope,” where writer’s block itself becomes the driving force of the tale. At some point you figure you might as well use the block itself for material. It’s a particularly crafty bit of self-preservation.

Creativity itself deserves a little more scrutiny, too, I think. I tend to think of people as either using it, or not, but that’s far too simplistic. It’s not just writing, or composing, or singing, or playing. It’s actually realizing that if you are hammering away at a problem and it’s not getting resolved, that you should try something different. It’s going around something, rather than through it. Which is why I’m sitting here typing this, rather than wondering when the hell I’ll ever have that flash of inspiration visit me again. At least there’s a blog post for today, now, and that’s worth more than nothing.

Striking writers

So Hollywood’s writers have gone on strike for the first time since 1988. That gives me the perfect excuse to think about what I was doing in 1988 (since this blog is All About Me, of course). That was the spring I was stuck at home before I went (back) to college, when I was slogging through a year of community college. I watched Letterman religiously back then, back when he was the funniest thing on TV. (For the record, though, I hate Chris Elliot.) I had not yet decided to watch Star Trek: TNG, which was probably a good thing because it pretty much sucked until the third season.

Of course, that was an election year, and the inevitable end of Reagan’s presidency was finally on deck. I was still too young to vote, and things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least Bloom County’s National Radical Meadow Party was still holding raucous caucuses. And we all have fond memories of Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.

In the realm of music, I was just getting into Crowded House with the foolish impression that I was finally getting into a band fairly early on in the game. Then I found out about Split Enz, whoops. I think that was also during the brief period when Sting was cool, which lasted up until I went to a show on his “Nothing Like the Sun” tour in August and decided he was kind of lame. That summer was also spent buying all the Genesis albums, which may cause you to wonder whether I should really consider myself an arbiter of cool.

All in all, the spring and summer of 1988 were characterized mostly by lots of sitting around waiting for my life to get its shit together. Er, is there any way I can tie that in with the writers’ strike? Too bad nobody from the Guild is around to help me out.