January 23, 2020

Motivation

Something special happens when you want to do, but don’t want to do the dos before what would be done. There’s a deep sense inside you saying what will and won’t happen according to priority. And what will happen must and what must happen requires a cucumber-keen motivation.

I’ll intersperse my usual self-conscious disclaimer that I am no oracle and am simply writing whatever this will turn out to be as a keepsake for myself and to those kind souls who’ve peeked over shoulder via my newsletter. It’s a two-way communiqué that you’re welcome to riff on.

A healthy individual is fond of a few of their own traits and dare I say I pride myself in my motivation. It hurts in a primal way to see the certain successes of others play out across the net, but that show makes it far too easy to think of your own flounders and forget the good stuff. I’ve had a pleasant amount of luck lately in my endeavors. Counting blessings keeps some humble humility handy so when that luck gets fucked I won’t be all too blindsided. A sacred font of ambition spouts from somewhere starboard of my digestive tract and it’s that trickle of motivation that’s enough to keep my boat afloat through imminent hardships.

I’ll share a spritz of that fountain with you.

Habits needn’t happen habitually

So many matters of motivation involve nursing habits to maturation. You should keep X, Y, and Z twice, thrice, and every other hour per week to keep a mate-attracting shape. You should write now and then and then and then for a puffed-up portfolio and read Rudyard in between. You should roll out of bed, hit the head, and steadfast to work for fortune. Finance family in a fractal pattern of unconditional appreciation. Condition a scalp sporadically, according to container label.

These habits happen not through Pavlovian pinging nor performance-enhancing app pushing. And they needn’t. Real repetitiveness reaches your brain stem through those sly sources you’d rather not acknowledge.

Alas, whatcha want to happen will with will.

I recently moved on from a pigeonhole position at a pretty unique company. As of this writing I am writhing in job apps and wringing the net for leads. It’s tedium at its finest, filing apps that should appeal to those you revere with a zeal that drops after each tap to submit. But I iterate, and turn the pesky process into a game that’s proven quite fun over the endless, blurry days.

What’s important is I haven’t made a habit of applying. No chore, no task, just me and a keyboard and cask, sending out and sipping down with frolic.

Life’s no joke

It’s a grand game, some Shakespearean twist turned on to new tech taking us from stage to system, library to level one.

My brother Kevin. I miss him some thousands of miles away. Both of my brothers, really. But this piece pertains to Kevin. Back at my parents’ house he’d careen into my room flinging bits and bouts of think things at the one AM’s and on. I’d be about to brush and hit hay and he’d say something silly or wise with no way to know which way it’d go. At a point in time he laid on the concept of centeredness.

You’re the main character. First-person perspective. Everyone else is an NPC.

Kevin’s a bold boy. He just does shit. To hell with it. He up and goes. Sociable devil. And this helps to explain.

An NPC is a game term for a Non-payable Character. The concept is that in life, you control you and everyone else goes about their business. Is it selfish?

Moons ago. High school. A fling with a Karen who stared at cars. She saw the metal boxes whir by linearly like light. And she wondered about the people inside and where they were going and how far that continuum of cars would spread once they’d gotten there. Similar concept.

I studied comparative religion. Reminiscing about some K’s of present and past has me swirling in religious philosophy. It circles back to motivation. And to circles.

Circles

Motivation is about circles. And dammit if I don’t provide a practical phrase here. Been spewing abstractities. Too much word Pollock. This piece is admittedly structureless, but from a draft and therefore requiring a return to prior thought. Therefore a challenge. Therefore a true think.

When I want to do but don’t want to do the necessary before-dos I brush off the dos of before. The dreary application process as example. Here I am, hashing out emails to companies that look damn nice. And I won’t settle for bull because as much as there’s bull to be done there are people in pretty chairs doing the good work. And I take a why-not-me attitude to it all. It’s not a perfect method and ends in a lot of exacting strike-outs and face-slaps and you-think-you’re-betters. Then it happens and is alright. Because it happened before. Woe was before and so was contentedness. Samsara.

Like that fountain I spoke of earlier, motivation sprays out liquid that lays down into itself at a big circular well surrounding and gets sump-pumped back out. If you’re not suspending reality to understand this metaphor you may ask what charges the pump because fountains need electricity. The answer is bananas with peanut butter.

January 18, 2020

Copy is terrible

Floppy copy, that pile of words wilted over itself ten times until folds become creases and creases become cold and snap into fragments of phonetic debris. Wind picks up and carries that debris up and you pick up the updraft breeze until you sneeze and some first paragraph splashes onto the screen, soaking through to software and deeper still into binary and then that little space between the ones and zeros. Suddenly, it’s all written up.

Whole-ass. Think about last time you whole-assed something. Maybe it was minuscule as an email, but you clicked send. And it meant something. The receiving end got a pocket vibration whiz ding tritone primal ear ping and picked up their rectangle to read your rubbish. Then they acted accordingly. You disturbed the universe. You whole-ass god.

Copy never feels more than half a cheek at most. That’s why there’s a clear natural division, so you can differentiate between what the werewolves are woofing at and what’s less. The fleshy full-moon Hendrix experience. Except instead of chopping mountains, you’re patting plastic dough on the silver palette of your keyboard. And others do the same. But their word debris gets watered down, mixed around and turned into some makeshift paint. They lay strokes, they design.

Done with design

Writers are designers. Idea architects. But designers are designers by name.

It’s a plain shame to see a work of art. Took an age to make and a brow-raise to eat. But you’re impressed by that eye meal. A design of any kind knows itself. It communicates how hard it was to hash out. Effort is immediately apparent.

Words take time to consume. A meat stick with retinas wriggles in excitement when it straw-sucks a petty poem. But real word-steak is thick. It listens to you, and you can’t possibly fit it in your mouth at once. Poems are hard, they stay—everything else is diethyl ether. Either here for good or gone.

Put your ear up close

Words are pictures. Everyone’s got their own mental museum. Picture a pink porous soft-puzzle brain. You might think it’s bubble gum mac and cheese through and through, but you’re wrong. Take an anatomy class. Brains contain little folders. Literal folders. They do. And those have pictures of every single thing you think you know.

Your own ear. Two, right? A mirror’s a mirage. You’ve never seen your ear. Put your ear up close to this. What does it see?

What we can make you do

When no one sees what you’ve said to them, there’s always someone syphoning the sound. In this case, it’s you.

Recipes

It’s not required to follow the recipe.

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This is the first musing after the first of ███’s Newsletter has been sent out. I have many prompts that sound like they’d actually be of some use, but can’t remember what wise-ass things I’d planned to say when I came up with the draft titles. They won’t be written til I’m in the mind to whole-ass them.

Promise more whole-ass wise-ass words.

███

January 7, 2020

Interrobang

Wanted to call this one Amateur after the afterthought ending of the previous post. Decided Interrobang was more interesting.

Interrosting. When you interrogate a swarm of bees? When they interrogate each other? Perhaps the intercourse of their stings. Needle tips colliding, ejecting torsos, mutual minuscule fury, pinpoint midair mortality, yellow-black pajama joust, pointy bug hug.

A slight interest in all things and lack of specialty make an especially decent writer. Someone who will do to do, and will notice in between. Someone told to be crisp who’s cryptic instead. They laugh at concept.

The bee scene was a mind spree but lean into it. When wasp tips whip together, it’s Newtonian physics. Hubris and humility, hydrogen fusion. Hell if I know what’s happening here, but the devil knows it’s fun.

Time for Turkish tea and bedtime renegade. Night‽