Unlike a lot of my fellow “creatives” or “creators” (I hate those terms, so pretentious . . . I miss the days when they just called us weirdos) I have no trouble getting down to the business of creativity. No meditative warm-up rituals for me. I just do it. All the time. I even do it in my sleep.
Creativity seems to be my brain’s default setting.
I have no idea how this happened. I don’t remember being any other way. I don’t know how to be any other way.
Maybe it was because I was the first child of my family’s rock and roll generation. No kids to play with in my toddler years. Just me in a world of big people, talking to a lot of imaginary friends who I no longer remember.
See? Leave me alone and I get creative. It’s a bad habit I got into early. I don’t advise it as a child-rearing or education strategy. Messed up in my socialization, that I’m still working on.
I’m doing it constantly. The only times I get bored when getting along with society (y’know, school, work, and all that) I’m forced to kick myself out of the creative mind state with its interior monologue and spontaneous daydream scenarios and put the bulk of my brain’s power on all this boring shit that people pay you for or get mad at you if you don’t go along with. I understand that a lot of you live that way.
My greatest nightmare is to get stuck there.
Lucky for me, I keep sliding back to my home sweet home in the back of my twisted brain.
The trick is to somehow plug this into a way to make a living. That’s another thing I’m still working on.
Maybe I can pull it off before I retire from the day job. Maybe my story collection Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions will be a bestseller and make me rich. Maybe the same will happen with my (as of yet unsold) novel Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin. Wouldn’t it be great if it happened with both of them?
(See how I managed to work a plug into this piece? Always strive to be a professional.)
Meanwhile, I keep my eyes and other sensory apparati wide open, scanning my environment for interesting input–there’s nothing deadlier than a bland, orderly environment.
Nuke the suburbs!
Naw, that’s probably going too far. Beside suburbs decay from the brainpans out, breeding their own brand of creeping weirdness.
“I need to be inspired!” The wannabes whine.
I just scan around, see things like the mummified tarantula that my wife brought home. It’s a male, you can tell because of the small abdomen. I imagine a tarantula version of Playboy full of sexy pictures of females with large, sexy abdomens. I wonder what Amazonian-style roast tarantula tastes like, and could it someday be a kind of fast food . . .
That’s the easy part. Maybe someday these things will show up in a story or some other creative production.
It’s a shame this doesn’t bring me more money.
