Today was a wash on writing and I’m not happy with myself. I had a few days I had to take off and I’m having a hard time getting my momentum going again. Mondays are like that sometimes, especially if I have been out of town and my attention has to be someplace else. Today I started off with some really ambitious goals and unfortunately, I didn’t get any of them done. Not even close.
One of the big roadblocks came as a feeling that I am screwing up my life. This comes from years of ingrained behavioral response that most of us struggle with. The doubt that the work I’m doing isn’t going to pan out. That I should just “quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” What I do know is a bad day of writing beats the hell out of being some minor cog in a machine of mundaety.
Tomorrow is a new day, and so I will try to do better.
That’s really just about all anyone can do. But the other way is something I am familiar with. Beating myself down to fit the mold that has been prescribed to me by my upbringing, by society, and by everything that I know so far. Unfortunately one thing that I learned is I hate how I feel when I have to take time off from working on the book. I lost three days. Sure, some of it I can chalk up mentally to research, but for the most part I feel like I was falling into old patterns. The old life of weekends and sleeping at “normal” times, and not being creative.
There’s a story about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and how he had an epiphany and was about to sit down and scribble out his greatest epic poem. At that moment, there was a knock at the door, and in the span of answering the door and trying to get rid of his caller, the poem slipped out of his mind forever.
The process can be frustrating, lonely, and difficult for those who don’t partake to understand. Most of the time I don’t understand it. Like tonight for instance, when 11pm rolled along and I finally felt about to break through my block, I dreaded that sensation of knowing that my mind wouldn’t shut the hell up until 3 or 4am. I’m still tired from the weekend, and the stress of the week. I do want to sleep at some point. Maybe I need to completely embrace my new normal. Unfortunately, that isn’t 100% viable right now. Especially on weeks where my son is with me and I have to supervise his online schooling. I hate that schools are still stuck on having to punch the clock and shoving that bullshit down our throats by proxy. I guess the metric to determine if teachers are working is to set up annoying Zoom meetings all throughout the day for the kids to attend.
Just FYI, the Zoom meetings are all pretty much kids jabbering into their mics because they aren’t muted and the teacher dealing with that chaos. There’s no real reason for it, other than to show their work. To prove to some bureaucrats in the state that the teachers are earning their keep. I feel bad for them, and for the kids, and I am pissed off that instead of being able to work my own schedule, which doesn’t conform with any conventional schedule at all, I am bound to this clusterfuckery myself.
Everyday these Zoom meetings are my Person from Porlock and they are doing their damnedest to interrupt up my own personal Kubla Khan. The rest is just me getting in my own way. Mondays are usually a wash, as I grind gears, adjusting to my schedule alone or with my son. It can be a real bitch sometimes.
ANyway, tomorrow I have a big chapter to flesh out, otherwise I would have worked on it tonight. Tomorrow is another day.
Wendigo Mountain 