Distractions

Today was a good day to be distracted. In my post for this morning I talked about it being a big anniversary. My mom, Penny, and I went to Cheyenne to get building supplies for the house. I’m finishing up the trim in the kitchen this week and that is the nearest place with inexpensive supplies. We got to take our time. We even stopped at a few other places along the way. Downtown was crawling with kids and parents in costumes. Which was pretty neat to see. It’s been a while. Last year with lockdown happening, we missed Halloween. Well, I didn’t miss Halloween much at all.

Honestly, other than the kids we saw in Laramie and Cheyenne wearing Halloween costumes, this holiday still needs some time (a lot of time) before I am on better terms with it. As I wrote before, it’s the anniversary of the beginning of my divorce, as well as being the anniversary of my doomed marriage. My former spouse was a BIG Halloween enthusiast. She would start preparing at the end of September. We would decorate the house and using piles of leaves and styrofoam headstones, we would make the front yard into a graveyard. She would always go full-tilt on costumes for the kids too. Some years she would make them herself, and other years, she would buy actual vintage military uniforms and pins and buckles and everything else to really give the costumes details. We would go to Island Grove in Greeley, where they have a historical village set up. And every year, she would sweep the costume contest with all three kids.

One year, my youngest won for his Red Baron costume, which was a red triplane built around his wagon. His older brother won with an authentic doughboy uniform from WWI, and his sister won with a Florence Nightengale nurse costume.

As cool as the costumes were, a price had to be paid. Not only were they very expensive, and we already lived on a shoestring budget, but the hours of work she threw into them created a lot of stress at home. Usually with a fight that would flare up as she was putting the finishing touches on their costumes as we were walking out the door to the contest. Walking on eggshells because anything to disrupt the flow of making award winning costumes carried a heavy penalty. The biggest bummer is the kids usually didn’t get to trick-or-treat in the same costumes. They wore a hardier sustitute. At any rate, by the end of it, the kids didn’t get to roam the neighborhoods pilfering candy. We usually got a jack-o-lantern pizza at Papa Murphy’s and hot wings and the kids watched a movie downstairs and we tried to relax. For the most part, all the joy had been sucked out of it. There were boxes of old costumes in the basement that had been worn long enough to win awards and were never touched again.

And forget about the anniversary. Everything was prelude to the big Halloween show. We never celebrated our anniversary.

Those years are fading, and I write them down now and feel almost like they happened to somebody else. But sometimes an event will trigger something in the back of my mind. The ghost hunting shows (my ex was a TAPS member and the ghost hunting group had big events to do, and I stayed at home with the kids). It was at least 20 pounds of spuds crammed into a five pound bag. Then the holidays began with the extra expenses and exhaustion that came with them. As is the case for most of us. Combine that with my usual dread of growing up in North Park with Halloween usually being the first snow of a long winter, and it wasn’t particularly fun.

This year I’ll be alone for the holiday. I will probably keep my lights off and my curtains closed. It might be a while before I get excited about the holiday again, but I have hope that one day that will change. I haven’t even been to a decent Halloween party since college. Maybe I’ll throw one myself one of these days. With costumes and decorations and all that. My former girlfriend had stories of legendary parties she would go to in Portland, and it always made me wonder what that was like. Maybe one of these days!

Anyway, I got what I needed for the projects I need to finish, and I was out of the house, visiting with my mom and driving. Penny still hates my driving and threw up on my mom’s coffee while we went into a store. She was mostly stressed that the back seats were folded down so I could fit 8′ sections of trim in the Jeep.

Someone wished me peace today for a hard day, and at the time, I think they understood how much harder it would be on me than I did at the time. They were right. It was hard. I realize now that I had been distracting myself. Now that I am home and the quiet of the evening is settling in, I decided to get these words down. I needed to.

This time of year hasn’t been a season of costumes and parties and candy for a long time. Because of the events that happened at this time of year for the last 22 years, it has become something else. A time of reflection on the past. A time of hope for the future. Maybe it’s more in line with Samhain. The end of the harvest. The beginning of Winter.

And burying old ghosts.

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Better Boundaries

One of the things I have encountered while trying to write full time is how much it just looks to other people like you are screwing around.

Yes, there is some screwing around to be expected, but a lot of what you don’t see is mapping out your thoughts, drawing in information, and trying to get to a state of equilibrium where the outside distractions are at a minimum and your work can begin.

I was talking with a friend last night who was in the middle of helping out a friend with some divorce drama. She had work of her own to do, but being a good friend, she took the time to work things out with her friend who was struggling. After a few hours of this, the end of the evening was closing in and she still hadn’t written her paper. The friend was fine, she probably would have been fine, but for my friend, there was still a paper to be written, an impending deadline, and now a whole bucketload of frustration and exhaustion.

Yesterday was a lot like that for me too. I started off the day after a rough night with the dog wanting to go out at 7:30am. We headed out into the snow, where she took care of business, and then we ran into my dad, who always wants a conversation. I am not much of a morning person. Unlike a retired man who begins every day at 5am and always has some kind of project to fiddle with, my brain refuses to engage until around 10. The reason for this is I often work until 2am. That is when the house is quiet, no kids are throwing Star Wars trivia at me, and nobody has to use my computer for endless busywork projects their online school throws at them throughout the day. Even the dog chills out from her need to be petted, a toy thrown, or let out.

My dad likes to visit. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just I have a finite number of things I have to say in a day, and trying to fill out the early morning pre-coffee with conversation is really pulling the rope a long way in a dry well. So, my day started with guilt.

Are we going to fix the heater in your car today?

No. I hadn’t been planning on it.

Oh. Gonna write some blogs today then?

Fuck. I was. Now that I’ve been guilted about it, I think I’ll do a couple loads of laundry, and about a hundred thousand other things that aren’t writing. Maybe feel like I’m not doing enough to satisfy the production level which is expected of me by my family.

A buddy of mine once told me when I was struggling with some writer’s block and I couldn’t stay off social media, “Avoid garbage words in the morning.” he said.

The old legend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge who sat down to pen Kublai Khan and how he was interrupted by the Person from Porlock and most of the great bits of the epic poem evaporated from his head is something that happens almost daily for me. When I have to struggle to talk to people in the morning and force some semblance of conversation, which usually ends in some sort of criticism, I’m not happy. Between my recent daily emails of how I am lacking as a human being from my ex-wife and my dad’s critivisits, it’s a wonder I get anything done.

Sometimes I just don’t want to talk to anybody! Much less someone whose negativity I have to match to make a connection.

The hardest thing about the creative process, whether it is painting, poetry, art, writing, singing, songwriting, broadcasting, etc. is convincing people who don’t have to come up with shit from thin air that you are actually being productive. The same goes for writing papers, writing copy for companies, studying, etc. It’s work. It requires concentration. If roles were reversed, could they just sit down and put their thoughts into some kind of media? Those who can do it well make it look easy. It doesn’t mean that it is. It doesn’t mean that we don’t agonize over details to get them just right, so that a reader can just breeze through it and not appreciate the artistry that went into it.

Think of a cabinet. Somebody planned that, measured the wood, cut it to specifications, planed it, assembled it, stained and finished it, and all the rest. And you just stick your coffee mugs inside of it. Do you ever think for a moment the work and effort it takes to put something together like this? No! Because it is so basic and utilitarian you aren’t meant to throw yourselves at its feet and worship it for the art that it is! It doesn’t mean that passion and thought didn’t go into it. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t step back when it was done and say “I hope somebody really enjoys this.”

We all consume. We all just carry on. To the next one. And the next. And so on.

Stop it.

If you don’t make better boundries, people will come in to your life and grab everything they can carry off. If they get mad about the boundaries, then those boundaries were made exactly for that person. Boundaries filter out the people who just take and never give back. Feel about as guilty at the outrage they exude as you would someone flipping you off in traffic. It’s a meaningless gesture. If what you are doing has meaning. If you are chasing your dream or following a plan to achieve a goal, then keep moving forward. Put up those boundaries and do it without remorse.

Because when your energy is spent, they just go home with a full tank and a comfy bed, and you are the one questioning your life choices at 11:40pm. They won’t feel ANY guilt about it. They won’t be the ones without shit written, a late paper, another sleepless night, a sense of failure, and the whole thing to try to avoid again tomorrow.

We don’t get an unlimited number of tomorrows.

Distractifications

Last night when I went to bed, I had big plans for today. I was going to wake up early, sit down and really just go to town with writing. I should have known this morning at 8:40 when I woke up that all those plans were going to get blown to hell. I’m still working up to my routine. Yesterday, I felt that push of Resistance. I saw that long corridor of fear and that Sissiphysian push uphill with my rock, that I chose to see it as. Instead of seeing it as the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I wonder if this is what keeps stray dogs wandering around neighborhoods where they have been chained too long.

I forced my hand to make the words happen and it worked. It always feels good to write. Every chance I get to set down and snatch the words out of the aether and put them on the page feels good. What doesn’t feel good is sitting on my ass doing data entry. Listening to coworkers talk about ham or taffy for hours, or be regaled by the tales of recent surgeries or the medicines they are taking for something as stupid as being overweight.

This morning is a moment of resistance. The Newtonian law of an object at rest remaining at rest applies to the Creative mind as well. The unbalanced force is when we will ourselves to put our butts in the chair, pick up that artist’s pencil, start mixing paint, or turning off social media and turning on our minds.

But wait. There might just be that one friend on Facebook who says something witty, or maybe I can visit with someone to become motivated? Or maybe this book will write itself and I just don’t wannnnnaaaaa!!!!

These are all just ways to continually distract yourself. Binge-watching a series on Netflix, arguing with someone about politics/pandemics/Star Wars. I understand that I need to build a resume, that I need to build my website again–after losing a year’s worth of posts. I need to keep my options open for freelance work and have to check Indeed and LinkedIn and other sites for this. And I should set up a Fiverr account too to try to bring in more income.

But what I have had the opportunity to do for several weeks now, but haven’t because of distractions is work on the book. First it was the pandemic, then the layoff, then the breakup, then the…damn, I’ve run out of distractions…how do I create more? Why not work on the book? I can do that. I can do all the rest and still have time. Once you remove the time you piss away on social media and driving around to run errands, you free up a lot of time. Even the words I’m writing right now are a way to distract myself. So, why?

Because I’m afraid of that book. It’s one thing to write a paid blog post about why you should shop at a certain hardware store, or the dangers of toxic mold, but when that writing gets bought, you feel good. You get to put a little away in savings. You get to pay a bill. When they don’t sell, you shrug and just figure that was a small chunk of your time that didn’t pan out. When you spend YEARS writing a book, and people hate it, or worse yet, people buy it and never read it. Well, you wonder why you spent all that time writing it in the first place. You have made more money writing about rain gutters or dental implants.

There are worlds out there your mind is creating and it’s up to your butt (in that chair), your fingers (on those keys), and your caffeine tolerance (how much until my heart actually explodes?) to get those stories out.

You risk it all when you tell people your dreams.

But when those dreams don’t get to be born, they die inside of you. When they are on the page, they flirt with immortality.

Time to stop letting myself be distracted. Today, I get to do something about it.