Sunday, August 8, 2010

Work In Progress

Its been over a month now and time is starting to sink in. Moving to a new place, especially when you've taken the opportunity to ditch the less-than-satisfactory accumulated furniture, can certainly mean that you're living in a messy and less than organized space for a time. Without some of the required furniture, unpacking can be rather partial for quite a long time; but that's the game you have to play when you decide to upgrade.

Its a weird thing to do, upgrading, when you've spent years scrounging, fixing up, and just generally making due with whatever you could get your hands on. Why buy bookshelves, when you can just pick some up in the alley, paint them up and line them up against the wall, stacked with anything made out of paper with printed ink? Why spend the dough on a dresser when you can fix that thrift up, and dump your stacks of t-shirts in it?

Well, its a simple shift really, its when you start seeing the need for a coherent whole, instead of just a practical hodgepodge. Its actually a nice thing to have your bookshelves in a sort of logical sequence, where they are all pretty much the same size, or a matching set, where looking at them does not require you to squint your eyes to fuzz over the sight of them and shrug and give up. Its like moving on from wearing things that are "clean" to things that "match". Because all too often, things that match just work much better than just relying on things that work.

Up the benchmark as it is.

So after months of having not touched anything, of having packed it up, and at this point, having pretty much all of it just stacked up pelle-mele in the office, its time for a creative workspace to emerge. There are things that defy creativity; yes, it is possible to just write stuff up sitting on a busted box half a mile under the earth in a coal mine, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

No matter how mentally strong you are, your environment does have an effect on your creative output, or even more to the point, on your creative drive. If you are of the creative type, and your life sucks, your work situation is precarious and your living arrangements are somewhat shifty, you tend to be highly motivated to run creative output marathons, where the least amount of tools are required to get the most amount out, because your motivation is so high up that you just have to express it or your head will explode.

But once all of that stabilize, you end up with the return of the pendulum, as the accumulated security of your existence will bog down the creative process. You tend to become focused maintaining the stuff you've accumulated, instead of making something new. And all that stuff piled up around you will act as miles and miles of intellectual speed bumps, slowing down the creative race to a snail's pace. Its not that you no longer get ideas, its that its become too cumbersome to actually act upon them.

But I have had enough of this shyte. Today is the day where I confront the procrastinating urge, and turn it into a proactive kick-in-the-ass for the artistic lunatic that lurks within.

I'm not claiming that there's a genius inside; but if I dont look for it and exercise my media muscles, I'll be thinking that TV writers are pretty damn good at their jobs pretty soon... and I dont know if I can live with myself accepting such mediocrity as a valid philosophy.

Here's to Chaos! Hail Eris!