Thomas Sullivan: SEA LIONS IN COFFINS, GETTING LOST & WRITING WITHOUT WORDS
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
