So I'm starting work on Monday.
I got the call a little while ago. It's more administrative grunt work, and the pay is okay so I guess all that nauseating ass kissing has paid off.
I'm hoping that working full time, as little as I want to be at work at 8:30 AM every morning, will help me boost my creativity.
See I've been a bit stagnant as of late. Just sort of uninspired. I have all of the next issue of the comic sketched and just need to ink it, but haven't had the compunction. I have several pieces of canvas sitting around, tons of paint, and I'm struggling with an idea. It's not that they aren't in my head but I can't seem to reach the cohesive vision to get them out. I tried to sit down with the novel today. You see, there's a point where Lucia's friend Mara points out to her that this guy Ben, Lucia's confidant, has had a secret crush on her. Lucia is thinking about this, and tries to piece together innocuous parts of her past, trying to decide whether she believes it or not. She then thinks about whether she wants to see it this way or not.
 This should be very easy for me to write. I know all these characters intimately and character interactions are something of my specialty. And god knows I've known enough people, seen the subtlety of human interaction and how we as people see things in a different light when new information is provided.
But I'm stuck. I mean, really stuck, and I don't know why.
Maybe it's a winter funk, boredom, fatigue. Maybe once I start working I'll at least have enough external activity and contact to compel my internal universe to manifest itself.
I've been thinking about this a lot.
Surely you have noticed that these essays aren't going quite as deep, saying quite as much as they used to.  I suppose if I have booze and ephedrine I can start obnoxiously rattling off whatever thoughts come into my head but when I sit down at the keyboard I draw a blank. It's not that there isn't thought there, that there isn't sentiment and depth that has the potential to be transformed into a solid form: a painting, an essay, a poem. But that last step isn't being made.
 Perhaps I'm thinking about it too much, and it simply is a lull before some sort of evolution and the next mode will be better. Maybe I'm feeling more reclusive than usual and not too big on that whole offering a lens to my psyche for all the world to see business.
There's a lot of stuff coming up, I have the new job to start, we're going to New Orleans in February, Cuernavaca in October, then Italy and Greece in December. It's going to be a good year to travel.
 What am I getting at?
Well, for one there's no flying cars.
I'm carving out visions for the year, praying for inspiration. It seemed I used to have inspiration but no time to create. Now my mind has its internal clock timed to daytime television.
And I blame the flying cars.
Well not really. They're a symptom more than a cause.
I had a dream I was in a building.  Actually it was sort of a maze of buildings. Instead of an elevator, there was a hover craft. You had all these screens with company names. You picked the location by pushing on the name and it would take you right there.
So much sci fi of yore had stuff like this. What do we have now? Buying groceries online and instant messenger? Fuck, we should have had that ten years ago! Now we don't even have good science fiction. Why bother, after all, we don't have a vision of the future because we're so narrow in our goals that even with the technology we don't realize our goals.
 There has been a collective death of the imagination. While this isn't responsible for my plight, that I can see it is disturbing as I'm one of the most imaginative people that I know. We're drab shells. We parrot whatever we see and hear. We don't seek new ideas, new developments, new experiences. We seek to parrot blindly everything that has come before in new trappings. This is true with everything. Our movies are just updates of old ones. We have no new fashions, no new philosophies, no new perspectives, no evolution.
Everyday creativity takes a back seat. We lose ourselves in things, we lose ourselves in quick fix solutions. We take prozac if we're feeling the slightest bit blue, even though it stifles creativity and numbs thought. It's easier than going into therapy, analysing ourselves or doing artwork to express ourselves. How many brilliant people were anti social, anxiety prone, paranoid or depressed? How many inventors didn't fit in socially, how many artists have contributions in world famous museums, who would have been slapped on drugs or simply fabricating an identity in a chat room?
 Distractions are fun but we need drugs that will stimulate our thinking processes, not stifle them. We need entertainment that actually deals with the human condition, not vapid two dimensional stereotypes. We need to stop lowering the bar, making uncreative shlock, pandering to the lowest common denominator.  We need to push creativity, inventiveness, technology and art as far as it will go. Not repressing it because we're afraid some vacuous morons will be intimidated by it.

 january             pontifications