Pssst…me again. Thought I’d check in on you. See what kind of problems you got today. No problems? That’s a problem. You’re an adventurer, a thinker, a romantic, a thrillseeker — something in a Walter Mitty fantasy that needs an adrenaline feed. You need a problem. Well…to be precise, you need a problem and a solution all in one shot. If you’re a writer, you especially need something going on in the — whatchamacallit — inspiration department.
I never run out of inspiration. Okay…okay, sometimes I run out of inspiration. Okay, a lot of times I run out of inspiration. Whenever I’m suffocating, actually. Apathy suffocates me. And I tend to get blue around the gills in a room full of oxygen if it’s being breathed by dull people in formal situations. My least favorite vegetables are cooked carrots, rutabaga and dull people. People who don’t respond and mistake prattle for conversation are duller than mosquitoes droning a Gregorian chant. People who veg out like sea lions in coffins make me catatonic. That’s when my eyes glaze over and my internal rockets launch for the far side of the universe.
True, I am easily motivated. But I am just as easily unmotivated. People I can’t light up unmotivate me. If you want to call that a lack of inspiration, okay, but really I just go underground. Inside my head the burners are still blazing as I entertain myself. I call that: WRITING WITHOUT WORDS. Sometimes I just crack me up — such a funny guy, ha, ha, sob, sob. You’d think someone would want to push my best stuff out there in front of people, cultivate an audience. Oh, the world owes me a living! But it doesn’t. It do not. Uh-uh. Nope. So, eventually I have to forgive the world for not loving me, make peace with it, and approach it on its own terms. Eat your veggies, Sully.
Okay, now comes the part where I throw you some of my favorite tricks for inspiration. I might as well tell you right now that they sound silly. But that’s the whole idea. If they don’t sound frigging ridiculous, they won’t shake anything up, and you need to be shaken up when you are uninspired. That is what they do for severely depressed patients, you know — shake them up. For instance, they might wake them in the middle of the night. That puts the depressed person in a different world. It’s a change from their expectations, their routine, and the overwhelming hopelessness that has them locked down. It might seem pointless, but regarding everything as pointless is exactly the rationale we use to procrastinate until we become so inert that doing anything, however unorthodox, is a better option. We need to stop smoking the brakes. We need to grind some gears and DO something.
Example, Sully. Right. Example: Go somewhere you have no reason to be. (Yo, I’ve done this, you betcha – hell, I do it every day without trying.) Try walking three miles to a corner totally unrelated to your neighborhood or anywhere you normally go. Then think how disconnected you are at that moment.
Feel the rain.
Feel the snow.
Feel the sun.
Feel the wind.
Take whatever is there. Shape it. Now invent the future you want. The present is ever sashaying into the past before you can pin it down. And the past is dead. Life goes in one direction. If you missed the life you should have led, at least live the life you have left. Make it what you want. There are always flashes of light in the broken glass of your dreams.
As you gaze at the traffic light – red, green, red, green — ask yourself, What if I never go back?
So now you reinvent yourself right there. Don’t skimp on the dimensions. Roles have hammered your shape into what it was before you walked here, but now at this new intersection you can be whatever you want to be. You can’t be born again, but you can grow, edit, morph. Once you drop the embalming expectations and the fear-and-guilt driven inhibitions, you may surprise yourself with what emerges from your repressed soul. The unfettered passion, the unhampered reach, the uncompromised dreams — like seeds trying to grow in the dark.
This is the beginning of magic. In you. Still. And if it’s still there, you have to ask yourself how/why you let it slip away in the first place. How did you get to this time and place in your life? Where were you born? What or who were your companions for the first 20 years of life? Are your dreams still alive? What is crushing you? What is floating your boat? Are you who you thought you would be? Watch the traffic going by and realize you are a stranger. You have no history, no failures, no disappointments. Just a stranger standing on a corner. The intersection of Nowhere and One Way. You can wait out the red light, or you can follow the green. Go in any direction you want. Be anyone you want. At least for a while.
Now, for whatever reason, you may be saying that you can’t go somewhere you have no reason to be. Your shackles are a 24/7 job or a family or physical limitations or you’re sitting in a jail cell in DeHoCo (Detroit House of Corrections). Well…yeah, it’s cool if you can take a trip to Nova Scotia or drive 300 miles on a whim some night, but even if you have to sit backwards in a bath tub (warning: sitting backward on a toilet is not recommended) or go stand in a closet, you can put yourself in a position that makes you see the world differently for a while and stops the clock and causes you to THINK new stuff.
Vitality is stimulated — or smothered — by context. But the thing is you get to pick the context, and if you fail to take advantage of that, then what’s left except to fold your hand and take what you get?
More on this in future columns. Right now I’ve got to get lost so that magic can find me. Got to go visit a beaver dam deep in a local woods. Really. It’s the wrong time, the wrong season and the wrong place (see photo at start of column) – what could be more lost than that?
May I invite you to follow me on Twitter? It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer. 2 samples of recent Tweets: I’ve been practicing stupidity all day. Then I realized something very profound. I don’t need to practice… And… Considering the number of vitamin pills that have rolled under the ‘fridge, I have the healthiest spiders in the Universe. Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
PPP no longer stands for point-to-point-protocol. It stands for Plug-in Post Plague. That’s a little problem that comes with the territory of freeware for WordPress. You take the stuff and you get the unexpected consequences with it. Dave is working diligently on the problem, which means reinventing the wheel. So for the time being we have split blogs, as many of you know. There is a Main Page blog and a Personal Archive blog, and many posters get confused or discouraged because they don’t see their posts where they expect to see them. I promised Vicki Tyley last month that I would try to collate the separate posts as they came in to different blogs the day of my column, so this is the first such attempt. Bear in mind, that a lot of responders to my columns got their link from my simultaneously sent newsletter, which means they reach my Archive Blog. OK, without further ado, here’s Vicki’s post from the Archive blog…
Vicki:
December 16th, 2009 at 01:09 | #1 Reply | Quote | Advanced edit “You can’t be born again, but you can grow, edit, morph.” Exactly! No stagnating.
Another insightful and thought-provoking post, Sully.
December 16th, 2009 at 01:18 | #2 Reply | Quote | Advanced edit It must be geographic. My column never feels complete until I hear from Australia. Thanks, Vicki. BTW, haven’t been able to respond to your email from the newsletter because my mailbox is jammed. Happens every time I do a bulk mailout. I can receive mails, but not send. It will clear by morning, or sooner I think.
See, the problem isn’t really there anymore though Sully. The comments are always open now on the main blog…it’s only your NL that sends them to the other one. I think. I got a link today through my Google Reader, and it took me straight to here, which is what we want, I think, comments here, and archive there…
As for the inspiration…I have a place I go sometimes when I’m driving, or walking. I think about the houses around me, the people I don’t know at all, and how as far as my world and theirs are concerned, we might as well be in different worlds. This leads back to the realization that, no matter how close we are, we all still see things a little differently. You can use this to build characters and lives in your mind that you’ve never met, but might…
Great essay, as always.
D
Ray Bradbury used to do that on a bike in LA, and Wayne Sallee does it walking around Chicago. Me, I have plenty of opportunity to do it as I drive around for hours almost every night and bike to communities as far as 30 miles away. It’s amazing how well you can come to understand walls and people in houses.
Yeah, my newsletter is the problem, Dave. Was going to point them to the main page originally, but most of them don’t check any link until subsequent days, at which point my column will be scrowled out of sight on the main page, or even off it. I get a lot of hits on old columns and even posts. I’d probably lose those reads if they had to scroll through pages. Not that the archives makes spotting comments easier, if any are made. The main page is better for that (notifications don’t seem to work for archives). Last night I stumbled on one comment for the September column and another for November.
– Sully
Robert Jones December 16th, 2009 at 11:00 | #5 Reply | Quote One of these days, someone is going to publish a book of Sullivanisms. In your December unplug, you graciously gave us more than one.
“My least favorite vegetables are cooked carrots, rutabaga and dull people,” is a rare double slammer in that it not only banishes persons from a group with whom you might like to spent time on a small island, it banishes them from the very taxonomical kingdom of mammalia and metaphorically inserts them into the kingdom of plantae – not an easy thing to do.
“The present is ever sashaying into the past before you can pin it down,” is an absolute truism that describes an experience that triggers many afterthoughts. These include both pleasant and regretful memories, and the two fade at different rates. An awareness of the phenomenon can itself inspire us to saddle up and give old Nellie free rein.
Thank you, amigo, for once again inspiring us not only with respect to what to do but how to do it when living as well as when writing.
Amalgam
They sound better when YOU say them, amigo. Thanks, Amalgam. Maybe we can put your picture on the cover if a book of Sullivanisms somehow gets its dance upon the stage. I always thought you looked like that Dewar Scotch guy — elegant Viking look.
– Sully
Hey Sully…one possibility is that we do a search of “Thomas Sullivan” on the main sight, and then use the search link as your URL for your newsletter. That would bring up ALL of your posts, the newest at the top, no matter when they clicked it.
Just thinking.
This is why you get the big bucks, Davey. Let me think about this — actually I didn’t realize there was a search function that would pull up such a list. The root problem (for me) is trying to find a way to keep a coherent thread going on the comments. I know you expressed starting threads as a goal in the beginning, and that’s what caught my attention, because we’ve been lacking that. Thus, my little fantasy was that no matter when a column of mine was read, it would be read with the comments intact. So the search list would be what? The Main Blog with all the comments that were posted that day or any time at the end of a link to it? That would still not reach my archive, but I could move the comments there, if necessary, even if there were a day or so delay. The big problem of having comments originate in the archive would be solved without sacrificing accessibility at any time. It might also solve the problem of notifications (which don’t seem to follow the settings for archives). You know, maybe I’m missing a key point here. As you’ve said before, these freeware plug-ins don’t come with instructions, and their effects can only be understood through trial and error sometimes. I’ve actually thought of something like what you suggest for some time, but I need to see how SU behaves over a couple of months to be sure. The new tracking for my columns didn’t begin until October 16, so I’m just getting up to speed on what happens when various comments and settings come in at different times in different places. Let me stumble through today, and see if I can get my act together with some conclusions, and thanks again, amigo, for bearing with this. I’m probably the only columnist who gives a horse’s patoo about all this minutiae, and that has to drive a web master crazy. Duh.
– Sully p.s. I’m doing this in open forum to simplify communications with those who might be interested.
> The intersection of Nowhere and One Way.
So you’re in Sage Noir mode today, Sully? Who knew!
The core message in this … seems like whenever I encounter it, in one form or another, a single exposure and it sticks with me for life.
Early Autumn, the first Spenser novel, from Robert B. Parker, that I ever read: Spenser says that any time he was dead-ended on a case and didn’t know what to do next, he’d find some clandestine way to stir the pot with whoever he had his eye on, just to see how they’d react and where they would lead him next.
Magus and megalomaniac Aleister Crowley: He reportedly made a habit of doing odd little things, however trivial, to keep his subconscious charged.
Others, but you get the idea. Strange, though — I not only remember the gist of these encounters, but the hands-on experience of reading them, lit up as they were with a sparkly kindred recognition of possibility. Must be a hardwired tendency in some of us…
The upshot being that today’s essay will likely stick with me forever too.
I fear that the only thing between those of us who engage in such behavior and a mental institution is the catch-all label “author,” which is sort of a license to be eccentric (the polite word for insane). Not sure which of Aleister’s “odd little things” you refer to, however, so I’ll make a distinction between the kind of magic he practiced and mine. Sage Noir, though, I’ll glom onto that — definitely a step up for me. Methinks you are one of the few capable of thinking outside the box, my friend. Thanks for the observations.
– Sully
Test post 2009 12-17
“…the broken glass of your dreams.” How could I not love that? Always, Janet
Maybe a dream that is not in pieces has yet to reach its potential for refracting the full spectrum of light…
– Sully
Anne’s comment is transferred from Archive blog:
Anne December 18th, 2009 at 10:18 | #13 Reply | Quote Sully,
I’ve heard when an irishmen tells you, ” to go to hell,” you think you’re going to enjoy the trip. Well, now I’m looking forward to “getting lost” more often. After reading the essay and sleeping on it, this morning’s ride through the mountains provided provoking head chatter. The debate was if WRITING WITHOUT WORDS is writing words using non-carboned form or maybe WRITING WITHOUT WORDS is what happens prior to non-carboned writing. When I got to the light, I chose work and will still have to dream about getting a printout of something in carbon form. Thanks for stirring up the veggies.
Anne
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe carbonation is in the imagination of the dreamer. You think?
Your comments always effervesce, Anne. And that’s a great Irish quote I had never heard before. Thanks for all of it. I’m heading out soon to write without words on trails without direction…
– Sully
Anne’s comment transferred from the archive blog.
Anne December 18th, 2009 at 17:12 | #15 Reply | Quote Sully,
Okay, carbon as in carbon 13, didn’t work, especially when carbonated. But it was not totally bubble brained Words and conscious thought intersect with inspiration and imagination. But where? Too often it’s sans perception. A metacognitive examination of where words enter our thought process when inspired — might morph more tangible words worth writing.
Anne
Not bubble-brained at all, and pinning down the morph ground zero is what it’s all about. You add some delicious terms to the mix (definitely sans veggies), thank you very much. Guess I’m always interested in that entry point between tangible and intangibles. Sort of like trying to find the bridge between quantum theories of medicine and biology based theories of medicine. In the case of creativity not sure it can ever be totally defined, though. Maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s what makes magic magic. If we COULD nail that intersection, would we lose the copyright to our thoughts and the patent to our souls?
– Sully
I always love your posts. So much richness in the writing; so much to think about. But two sentences in particular struck me with this post: The favorite vegetables line (it belongs on a t-shirt), and the one about finding the flashes of light in the broken glass of your dreams. (I think I will make that my writing mantra for 2010).
I’m honored to contribute to your 2010 mantra. That’s as close as I’m gonna come to a New Year’s resolution.
– Sully
I’m trying to keep up, sir. I really am. I can never read your posts without feeling like an ungrateful, little bald bug. That’s a good thing, you know.
Wayne
Now that’s a comment in a class by itself! I shall cherish it forever, though it in no way describes the actual master chronicler Wayne Allen Sallee. Speaking of keeping up, I just discovered a comment of yours from a month or two back that was hung up in WordPress’ ever vigilant automatic moderation. Don’t have a clue as to why it isolated it (unless you stuck out your tongue while you were writing it), but I freed it up and answered it. Thanks, amigo, and remember: “…grass don’t grow on a busy street.”
– Sully