There seems to be a strange feedback loop going on in my head lately. "All is naught, all is imperative,"--a thought that floats through every moment of my day, a senile shaman who's had too much peyote, dancing and cackling merrily in my poor sore noggin. The significance of every thought, every action weighs heavily on me, while the utter insignificance of it floats my feet inches from the floor. It's driving me crazy, this 'forcing me to address the day moment by moment' doublethink (thank you, Mr. Orwell, for that exquisitely appropriate concept).
So to deal with my new affliction, I've learned the sacred and mystical art of productive avoidance. A moving target is harder to hit, or so the reasoning goes. Clean the bathroom? Heck yeah! Change the water in the fish tank? You betcha! Suddenly decide to fix that length of fence line that had been peacefully falling down for five years? Sweet Georgia peaches yes! Be so tired that you want to pass out at the end of the day? That's the plan!
And it's there that the cracks in the dam are found; the blank concrete face that I had presented to the day found riddled with fissures and rotten to the point of failure. There is nothing so tempting to circular logic than a worn down, weakly defended mind. What that evil, spinning logic keeps forgetting, though, is my secret weapon. Or cache of weapons, if there is sufficient fodder for them all to come out to play.
My books.
Oh yes, that was a plural stuck in there. And no, it wasn't a typo (I have plenty of those pre-edit, thankyou vry muach). There are now two and a half books bubbling in the works, one mostly to completion, the other more of a series of post-it notes and scribbled notations on various scraps of flat, note-friendly mediums. They keep me busy with their worlds, and mostly out of harm's way.
I play with my plot, scheme with my themes, fraternize and satirize with my main characters, and generally get lost within the worlds that I have created in my own head. This sets up a wave propagation of delightful harmonics, cancelling out the squallings of introspective shamans, and luring me into the hopefully peaceful slumber that I crave.
Or sends me scrambling for note-friendly mediums to jot down a breakthrough concept that just won't wait for the morning. Either way, I consider the day productive if I can avoid spinning in circles, questioning the very reason for my existence on this wobbly globe we call home.
So to deal with my new affliction, I've learned the sacred and mystical art of productive avoidance. A moving target is harder to hit, or so the reasoning goes. Clean the bathroom? Heck yeah! Change the water in the fish tank? You betcha! Suddenly decide to fix that length of fence line that had been peacefully falling down for five years? Sweet Georgia peaches yes! Be so tired that you want to pass out at the end of the day? That's the plan!
And it's there that the cracks in the dam are found; the blank concrete face that I had presented to the day found riddled with fissures and rotten to the point of failure. There is nothing so tempting to circular logic than a worn down, weakly defended mind. What that evil, spinning logic keeps forgetting, though, is my secret weapon. Or cache of weapons, if there is sufficient fodder for them all to come out to play.
My books.
Oh yes, that was a plural stuck in there. And no, it wasn't a typo (I have plenty of those pre-edit, thankyou vry muach). There are now two and a half books bubbling in the works, one mostly to completion, the other more of a series of post-it notes and scribbled notations on various scraps of flat, note-friendly mediums. They keep me busy with their worlds, and mostly out of harm's way.
I play with my plot, scheme with my themes, fraternize and satirize with my main characters, and generally get lost within the worlds that I have created in my own head. This sets up a wave propagation of delightful harmonics, cancelling out the squallings of introspective shamans, and luring me into the hopefully peaceful slumber that I crave.
Or sends me scrambling for note-friendly mediums to jot down a breakthrough concept that just won't wait for the morning. Either way, I consider the day productive if I can avoid spinning in circles, questioning the very reason for my existence on this wobbly globe we call home.
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