shut up and make stuff, part II

Everyone needs to immediately run out and find this essay, graphic essay, whatever you want to call it by Lynda Barry. Why? Because she captures here in the most essential straightforward way the ridiculous cycle of fear and judgement most artists find themselves in, or maybe I'm projecting. One particular part of this work resinates for me, when a little figment of her imagination is leaning over her shoulder watching her draw and it says, "oooh that's good ... uh, you wrecked it." That is my biggest fear, I make something that is almost good, almost done, almost an expression of my true potential but I stop short, terrified that in adding to it I will wreck it. And so I have spent many years being "promising" but not achieving. So what do you do? How does Ms. Barry suggest I, all of us, escape this horrible trap? Shut up and make stuff. Enjoy the god damn process, stop thinking about it needing to become anything.  Stop thinking about results and instead think about experience. Ram Dass isn't dicking around when he says BE HERE NOW. 

So world of the interwebs, and my mom, I have officially finished my novel. I have managed to finish something I have been terrified to finish, because I haven't wanted to frog it up. But it is done and my mantra through out was "no judgment, not expectation." Did I live up to that? Hardly, but I had moments that were clear-eyed and true, moments that were just me and my characters in a room staring at each other saying, so enjoying the weather? And now I have the terrifying, exciting task of 1. selling the thing (not so process oriented) and 2. making something new. And here is where I get to embrace the moment. Not think of my next book, or my first one, but just write, just make work, generate pages and see what comes out. The joy of starting fresh is there are no limits to where I can take a story, no problems that need to be solved, no characters that need another level, it's just whatever it is. FUN! So I assume in the next week or two the writer's block will descend. Or I'll have to do more revising of the frogging book. Is anything every really finished? (another post all together)

night out

It wasn’t so much that I was old or that I was no longer willing to stay up past midnight. I stopped going out, specifically going dancing, because I was no longer a slave to my addiction. While I was a drinker, from the drinkenest town, I was what you would describe as a problem drinker. Some of my problems involved fidelity, unopened mail, honesty, the City of Boston Impound, and keeping food down. But my addiction was something else. When I escaped Boston and all the freshly tapped kegs of Pabst therein, I stopped. I stopped drinking the way you stop at a busy intersection. I no longer wanted to cross the street against the light. I wanted friends and a life and a job. I gave up my addiction to Nights Out. Liquor I could turn off, like it was a bad song on the radio, but the Night Out was harder. So full of potential, the Night Out held all the promise of every John Hughes movie that had made my twelve year old heart sing. The Night Out was not just dancing, though that was usually the most promising, it could be the local dive bar, or the house party of a friend of a friend. I had to know some people, but never everyone, there had to be an element of surprise, of, most crucially, possibility. This was my true addiction. Like a coke head searches for the cleanest high, I searched for the ultimate good time. The ultimate good time was a cliché, the party where I was the sparkling, brilliant, mysterious girl flowing through hallways and up stairwells, leaning in close to hear breathless confessions and sticky sweet gossip, on a mad search for cigarettes with a girl I’d never meet, listening to a boy cry about his lost love and mixing him the most outrageous drink I could create from pinapple juice, marachino cherries and stout, all to end or, actually, to never end with some blue-eyed mop-top in jeans that would be too small for me. Not casual, but destined, not fumbling but frenetic. And driving fast down roads where familiarity sufficed for sobriety, winding up on a roof top in the winter looking over the river, in a park on a bench snow coming down on a the half gone whisky bottle, in a loft above the paint store smoking a joint, a new party a new group, a new boy. But usually it was four beers, furious dancing or furious talking with the eternal wing girl, and then a swerving drive back, asleep by three up by noon. This addiction plagued me. Sent me to a local bar thinking that drinking would somehow bring about the perfect Night Out. But those nights never existed. A few came close, but ended in parking tickets or my car keys thrown on a roof, perilously close to being swept into the gutter with the leaves. The perfect high was far beyond the simplicity of white powder and green cocktails. It was a ghost that told me I was beautiful and unique and out there was a man that would read my mind and play my pussy like a flute and bring down the sky and heaven with the sweetness of his words and I would be fulfilled in everyway. I would be cool. I would be unafraid. I would be understood. The reality was a man that stalked me until I discovered I was too lonely to get a restraining order and too far away from my perfect Night Out to be alone with the tv and the bong.

            My Perfect Night Out now is very different, because it isn’t perfect or out or even at night most of the time. Usually it is afternoon in the park, watching the dogs swim at their muddy little beach. Or it is morning in bed in the sun with a man that gave me nothing but space until I couldn’t take it anymore. Or it is on a train heading home to my new city, the one that never sleeps, where ironically, I go to bed early.