Ruminations on air and space

I’m in a restless state, and it’s a particular kind of restlessness that I’ve finally been able to identify after years of trying to figure it out: it’s a mood that strikes when I’ve been spending too much time reading things. In particular, I’m talking about reading internet message boards and news sites. I can kill weeks keeping up with my favorite discussion sites, being amused at other people’s humor, touched by other people’s shared emotions, and irritated by their occasional idiocy. But at a certain point it’s just overwhelming to constantly be the recipient of communication—it’s tiring and even depressing. At that point, I get restless, and it’s only recently that I’ve put my finger on exactly why.

To constantly receive, and never create—well, it’s an imbalance and I apparently feel it at a visceral level rather than a conscious one. (I do want to acknowledge right up front the irony that you who are reading this are now slightly behind in your own subconscious striving for that same balance. And I’m the one who’s done that to you—sorry.) It manifests in a particular feeling that my head is too crowded with noise, that there’s an interfering hum of chatter that’s pushing out my own inner voice, and that there’s not enough air and not enough space inside for me to think any of my own thoughts.

You know, the Air and Space Museum in Washington is incompletely named: here I’m talking about mental air and mental space. It’s probably a stupid cliche that ideas need a little room to spread out in, or else they don't make it past the germination stage. Something patly metaphorical comes to mind about giving those young ideas room so they can grow to maturity. Let me really run this into the ground: it’s hard to differentiate ideas in the seedling stage; they all look much the same. With all the clatter of the world around me, it’s getting too loud in here. So it’s high time I stopped screwing around reading other people’s blather and started listening to what I myself might be thinking about.

As usual, in attempting the creative process, I end up thinking about the creative process. This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. I suppose it’s like the old joke about telling someone not to imagine an elephant. Anyway, I’ve been feeling frustrated about how mercurial creative thinking really is for me. It seems to happen at specific times of day, under circumstances that aren’t easily quantified, and it’s incredibly fragile. To continue ramming my botany metaphor into the ground, it’s more of an African violet or an orchid than a spider plant. And unfortunately, I love routine, and my routine doesn’t allow for a whole lot of opportunity for true creativity. The minutiae of daily life are always first on my mind, and if they aren’t taken care of, they nag me and keep me from freeing myself. Maybe if I had a chef and a personal assistant, I’d be a more creative person—heck, my African violet would probably still be alive, too.

But then I want to be more optimistic about my circumstances. There are a lot more ways to be creative in life than just the obvious methods of writing, or designing, or creating art or music. At least, I hope so, given most people’s need of a paycheck. Few people have the time to break out of the daily grind to really do something wild and new. This is where I do have to admit that there is one thing I had better in childhood than adulthood: the freedom to be unburdened by basic worries about life needs and to be creative on a large scale. Now it’s far more restricted, with more of my time taken up by other demands. A short story, a song, these are rare and precious, and I’m frustrated by that.

And if I’m not really producing something major, why go for small-scale achievement? When I hum a song or appreciate a design or read a novel, I’m being touched by someone across a wide gulf. The people who created those things really achieved something in their creation, to have an impact that reached me at all. That phenomenon never fails to make me feel intensely jealous. Of course, reading a post on a message board or blog is nothing like that in terms of scale. Do those matter, then? But that brings me back to my restlessness, and the reason for it. By typing out these ideas, by spending a little time in my own head just sifting through some thoughts, I can add a little weight to my side of the scale and restore a little bit of balance to things. That helps. And maybe some day I can clear the little things out of my way and really get on to something big.

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.

Those are some shoes

I’ve been reading a lot of other people’s writing recently, and that’s led me to misplace my own voice a bit. Some of it’s jealousy, some of it’s fatigue from the house-selling saga (I don’t feel like writing much about that, so for now let me sum up in two words: “lead paint”), some of it’s my intrinsic laziness. But I notice I don’t have much in the scriptorium category lately. Hopefully the house crap hasn’t completely dried up the creative juices.

Anyway, here’s a little story about a shoe. A very expensive shoe. I was minding my own business at the local bike shop, killing time while there was an open house at the domicile. And I’d been thinking about buying clipless pedals for my road bike sometime this spring, since you’re cool on a bicycle only if you have clipless. I mean, being physically connected to your bike conveys a special blend of hardcoreness (“I want to maximize my pedaling efficiency so I can bike just that much further before collapsing on my face in exhaustion”), dedication (“I’m serious enough to have special shoes just for cycling”), and masochism (“I plan on falling over and scraping up my knee with nasty road rash at least once because of a panic stop where I can’t detach my foot from the pedal in time”), and I was just about ready to sip that hot and zesty blend.

So I’m looking at the pedals. There are a few different brands with slightly different means of snapping onto the cleats on the shoes, but not too different. I figure I’ll go with what the Swami has, what the heck. Plus that was the cheapest option, and I don’t feel hardcore enough to spend a hundred bucks on friggin’ pedals. Having made that choice, I move on to the shoes. Here the salesperson takes a laudable position: she starts with the cheapest shoes. So I try ’em on. And of course, they’re terribly uncomfortable, too tight, bleah. Next price point up: nah, still kind of tight and chafing in a couple of places. Next pair: same dif. (Although I’m glad, because that particular pair was metallic silver, and I really wasn’t interested in looking like either Neil Armstrong or a breakdancer from 1985.) Hmmm, we are really climbing the ladder in terms of benjamins. Another pair goes by, and I’m starting to worry less about the money and more about my actual feet. Are they freakishly wide? Not in any universe I knew of—until I entered the European tiny-footed female cycling universe. It’s funny how trying on clothes that don’t fit can lead you to question your body rather than the clothes. (I think I just summed up a lot of neuroses with just that one sentence.) And then, just like that, we were at the top of the stack. Aaaaaah, that one felt awesome! It was like Cinderella with the prince, except with lots of Velcro and snappy clippy things to screw onto the bottom. And of course that shoe turned out to be so nice, as I turned it over and looked at the price tag: $230. Well, well, well.

And that’s how I bought the most expensive pair of shoes I’ve ever bought by far, for wearing maybe two or three hours a week at the most. And which will probably lead me to at least one scraped knee and a fair amount of beginner’s anxiety. But damn they are comfortable, and they make me want to ride. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Best haiku ever

We famous! Swami and I have collaborated on Wizards/Bullets haiku, posted for posterity on the completely insane fan site Wizznutzz. Click here and scroll down to the contributions by “Steve F.”

Hieronymus Bosch in a down parka

It’s been cold outside today. Cold in an empty-void-of-outer-space kind of way. I was out there wrapped in my warmest coat, two hats, hands inside gloves inside pockets and I could tell you exactly which square inches of my body were not covered in enough layers. (Ankles, bridge of the nose, toes.) And it’s times like that when you begin to grasp the speck-like insignificance of humanity, that the very air around you is not your friend as it tries to suck the life out of your body and the heat out of your skin. It makes me glad that medieval artists didn’t know about physics, because if they had, the center of the most ghoulish painting or carving depicting the horrific depths of hell would not have Satan at the center, but Thermodynamics, represented by a blank-eyed quadruple-fanged serpent with an empty belly drinking the warm life-force right out of its innocent victims, diamond-studded eyes staring with the cruel impersonality of a relentless, mindless force. (Or maybe I shouldn’t have watched any of Queen of the Damned on basic cable last night, a truly awful movie by one of the more awful writers of paperbacks I loved when I was a teenager, because it’s making me feel Gothic and tragic and positively overwrought. Moreover, to expand this parenthetical aside past the point of reason, Van Helsing was on basic cable tonight and I can confirm that it really sucks. I mean, you can’t even watch it for more than a few minutes at a time because the pain in your head intensifies with every second. Normally good actors acting very badly, bad actors acting badly, special effects that look completely cheesy, David Wenham’s appallingly terrible haircut, etc. Yeesh.)

Now I’ve lost my train of thought. Anyway, it was damn cold today and I’m someone who likes it cold. At the same time, for the next several days I’ll be the only person in this big house and that’s exacerbating this cold feeling. I’ve been blasting the TV and the music, and that helps. The next step is tossing this tiny stone into the giant ocean of cyberspace and causing a couple of ripples to remind the world that I’m over here generating heat, using electricity, and just generally being alive. Hey, remind me not to play “Log Cabin Fever” by Split Enz this week, okay? At least, not until Swami gets back from his trip to China.

Showdown at the Woodley Cafe

The night was dark. I was slouching through town, feeling unfamiliar in a crowd of strangers, trying to forget myself amid the crush trying to get noticed. I needed a stiff drink, there was definitely a stiff drink out there who was head over heels for me, and I knew there had to be a place where we could get acquainted. I walked into the nearest bar ’cause the farthest one was too many steps away.

Then I saw them, three goons that weren’t looking for trouble because trouble had heard they were looking and skipped town on the next Chinatown bus. That was trouble’s mistake, because everybody knows the Chinatown bus is as likely to leave you by the side of the road with your luggage on fire and soaked with antifreeze as drop you on a stinking street corner with a chopstick up your nose and a wonton up your ass. But never mind that. Back to the goons. It was like the Dating Game in one of Chuck Barris’s cocaine-fueled fever dreams: Bachelor #1 was probably the one they called the Kid, his innocent face all smiles after beating the latest murder rap with the help of a few guys named Ben Franklin. Bachelor #2 looked like he dug his bivouac next door to the Unabomber and made his own moccasins out of Ted Nugent’s hide. And Bachelor #3, well, he was the softspoken one, which means he might ask your opinion of Freddy Adu but shiv you even if he agreed with your take on the kid. I knew I should have kept on walking past that dive but then I caught their eye and it was too late to leave early.

The Shiv gestured to a seat next to him and I had to sit down. At that moment the waitron cashed in her years of training and asked for drink orders.

“What Scotch do you have?” the Shiv asked, and I hoped for my own sake she had whatever swill he was hoping to swig.

“We got Jack Daniels,” she responded, and then I knew it was all over for her and me both.

Then the Kid leaned forward. “They say you got quite an arm.”

“Do they,” I responded, playing it cool. If things went my way I might have a chance at getting out of there without it being feet first. “I wonder if they know what they’re talking about.”

Unabomber looked up from his half-sized glass of beer. I wondered if I was dressed as Dorothy because that bar was sure starting to look like Oz. “You see this nose?” He pulled a giant plastic nose out of his pocket and slammed it on the table.

Now I knew I was in crazytown but I thought it best not to point that out to the natives. “Yeah, I see that nose.”

“You beat the Kid at arm-wrestling, you get the nose. You lose, Shiv here gets yours.”

“Simple proposition,” I remarked. It might have confused the teetotaling waitron but it was crystal clear to me. “Let’s go for it.”

I clasped hands with the Kid and we planted our elbows on the table. At first, he was holding back on me, I could tell, letting me wear myself out early and then he could swoop in for the kill. So I kept it low-key, not showing off, knowing that the longer it went the more likely I would keep one of my favorite facial features. Actually, who am I kidding, I’m not a huge fan of my nose but I wasn’t ready to give it up for adoption to that bunch of jokers.

Time was ticking by and the Kid was looking a little less confident. I didn’t have him yet, though. I just kept my eyes on that nose and hoped that my arm didn’t leg out. At last I saw him start to crumble like Big Dig concrete, and finally I banged his arm to the table harder than Woody Hayes punched out Charlie Bauman in the Gator Bowl.

For a minute it was quieter than a room full of people sleeping through Elvis Costello’s North. Then I stood up, picked up the nose, and gave a salute. I figured I’d hit the road before their patience ran thin like Gene Keady’s combover. “Here’s to otolaryngology,” I said, picking up my drink and draining it in one shot.

That was one hell of a night in Washington, D.C.

Notes: cross-posted to Costello-l; visit here for a couple more pics!

Cleanliness is next to craziness

So I’ve been spending my Columbus Day hanging out at home, cleaning various things around the house. My hopelessly overstuffed email inbox, the bathtub, the kitchen counters—hell, I just dusted the toaster, for heaven’s sake. And since cleaning doesn’t require much brainpower, I’ve been pondering whether or not spending time dusting my toaster means I’m crazy.

I’m reminded of the scene in Sex, Lies, and Videotape when Andie MacDowell’s character is seen scrubbing various surfaces in her kitchen, obsessively shining the faucet on the sink. Clearly this is a shorthand way of explicating her inner turmoil: she tries to restore precise order and cleanliness to the outside world as her inner world is being buried under giant dust bunnies and growing various species of mildew. So whenever I put on the rubber gloves (whose package always has a well-manicured smiling woman on it—shouldn’t it show a person, lightheaded from bleach fumes, trying not to hurl while clearing out the shower drain?) I start thinking about being crazy.

Am I crazy? I would much rather have things clean than dirty. I sincerely wish my whole house were a giant dishwasher-like device whereby I could walk outside, flip a giant lever, and come back in an hour to a sparkling, steamy, and well-nigh sterile environment. Although, think of the water bill. Then again, no one could accuse me of being obsessively clean. I’d rather wait until things get really dusty or dirty and then it’s so much more satisfying to see their transformation back into shiny things you might actually want to touch or walk on or whatever. That seems like a reasonable desire to have in one’s life. If I weren’t overwhelmed by liberal guilt at the thought, I might even pay someone to clean things for me once in a while, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to ponder my possible state of insanity. So perhaps my behavior fails the crazy test, where I ask myself whether it’s affecting my life to the point where other people notice, or it harms my relationships, or I find myself curled into a fetal position when I realize that the mold on the bathroom ceiling spells CHENEY/HANNITY 2008. If that’s crazy, then I suppose the whole world is right there with me, and thus the asylum has become the whole world.

Have you ever noticed how much dust accumulates on desk chairs? It’s downright frightening. Remind me not to look down while I’m writing these posts.

"Recycling Day": a haiku

Recycling day dawns
Glissades of glass crash and crunch
The blue bin thunks down