Yeah, I’m throwing another one of these at you this soon. So what? You got a problem with that? Only 3/4 of you even opened the last one so I don’t even feel bad about it. I wrote most of this the other day, not today, but it is an accurate guide to my headspace when I’m not feeling like doing anything, which happens.
This is what I write when I don’t want to write. I’m writing this and sharing it with you, which will probably result in a bunch of you unsubscribing. There’s nothing offensive or objectionable under this paragraph, but it might not be what you want in your inbox. This isn’t about you, anyway. This is about me.
Anyway, this is what I write when I don’t want to write.
I am writing this completely against my will. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be in this chair, I don’t want to be typing this, I don’t want to be worried that my butt crack might be visible in this chair in this coffee shop (it probably is), I don’t want to be drinking this DECAF flat white in this Starbucks because I’m old and if I drink caffeine after a nonspecific hour I will spin around in bed all night, I don’t want to be creative, I don’t want to have to write this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.
I don’t want to be writing and listening to my music and it’s making me sad. It’s making me angry, too, and I’m hardly ever angry. I have a headache, probably because I fell asleep on the couch avoiding doing anything and now I’m angry that the afternoon nap will probably make me have trouble sleeping tonight, too. I need sleep. I get a lot of sleep, because I don’t set an alarm and I don’t have any reason to get up at any specific hour. I got a lot of sleep when I do have a reason to get up at a specific hour, but not having something to wake up for means I get extra sleep I probably don’t need. Getting enough sleep is important for your health, but getting too much sleep is bad. You have to get the right amount. This is true for everything in life. Too much of anything is bad. Too much oxygen will kill you. Too much water will kill you. Too much sleep will eventually kill you, maybe. As suicide goes, it’s not the most expeditious route.
I bet BJ Novak could get this published.
The reason why I don’t want to write is because I have to. I am forcing myself. I sometimes have to force myself to do things. I don’t simply mean that I have to do things I don’t want to do but that I feel a push and pull occurring in my mind. My need to feel productive, my need to not waste the day, my need to feel valuable, grasp my motivation by the shoulder straps and pull as hard as they can but my motivation, digs its heels down and pushes against the forces pulling at it. It wants to go back to bed. It wants to lie down. Once deployed, my motivation can do really cool stuff, but sometimes getting it to move takes effort. Sometimes that effort comes from external expectations. When I have to motivate myself, well, that’s a whole thing.
I imagine my motivated self wearing overalls because it works hard and overalls are what workers wear. I imagine those needs (to feel productive, to feel valuable, etc.) as weaker. They can’t do much on their own but if I get enough of them involved, they can move my motivation. It is big and blocky, like it’s made out of cement. It scrapes along the ground. Set to rolling, my motivation is a powerful force. The corners fly off and it turns into a ball, and it’s hard to stop. But sometimes it doesn’t want to move.
I blame a book I can’t remember for making me think of my mental processes with such vivid pictures. The book was about Grover, or at least featured Grover, and it depicted various bodily functions as factory-like stations, depending on its function.
No, that’s wrong. I’m combining two different memories. The factory-bodily- functions thing is from a cartoon and the Grover book is this one.
I distracted myself from writing by researching the world of Grover books. There are a lot. The one most people know is The Monster at the End of This Book, which one published novelist wrote about. He wrote more about that Grover book than anyone has ever written about anything I’ve written, but I didn’t write anything as brilliant as The Monster at the End of This Book, so it’s okay. I’m in an okay mood. Not great, not terrible.
I imagine my mood as a light just over my right shoulder, a few feet back. It is clouded and dingey, like an old street lamp. The color of that lamp reflects my mood. It’s different all the time. I turn my mind’s eye to that lamp to see how I feel. When somebody asks me how I am, I check that light. The color has nothing to do with the mood. I look at it and it tells me what my mood is, but not with words. I just know.
This is another weird visualization that I experience, but there are a lot.
Another one is the calendar. I just tweeted about this (another great way to not write). When I was in kindergarten, the calendar was displayed over the chalk board. We spent most of our day sitting in front of that calendar and that chalk board. It is seared into my brain. This calendar begins with September on one side and August on the other. It’s a feature of my mind’s landscape, a monument to the easy permanence of childhood experience. If I think about it too long, my interactions with children are paralyzed, because I don’t want to say something that they will inexplicably remember when they’re 42 years old and not writing.
Did you ever think of what is behind your eyes? I mean, it’s just brains and bone but sometimes I imagine it’s a huge apparatus that stretches into the sky. How do I know that I don’t have one? Of course it disappears in mirrors and photographs. Maybe we all have them, in the sideways universe that sits just beside our own.
This is what I write when I don’t want to write.