Are you a mattress in the wild?
Are you dumping mattresses in the wild of your work?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Are you a mattress in the wild? Did someone, not knowing what to do with you, dump you down a ravine? Are you laying there now, all twisted and awkward, surrounded by an ocean of poison oak, a discarded tennis shoe, and a rusted-out washing machine?
Dumped.
By someone too lazy.
Someone too naughty.
Someone too cheap.
Someone too…. It was you, wasn’t it? It was you who did the dumping under the cover of darkness right next to the sign that said “NO ARROJAR BASURA.” You naughty rabbit. You dumped yourself in the wild to hide your shame. Your stain. Your sunken age.
No…. Wait. I’m sorry, I’ve got that wrong. YOU aren’t the mattress in the wild. The mattress is one of your tired IDEAS. Man, look at it. Straight from the flophouse of your brain and into this alpine creek it goes. Let me guess—it’s a sleeper idea? Gonna sleep itself to the top of the world, you say?
Time out.
Let me move my mattress out of the way and get to some semblance of a point.
Whether that mattress is an idea, you, or all of us, is not important. (In this paragraph.) What is important is that you’re dumping mattresses in the wilderness, you arsehole! Seriously, those mattresses might as well be the rotting limbs and body parts of your conscience. The kind of stink they’re producing is downright criminal and more than a $1,000 fines-worth.
You probably felt so smart, dragging that old manky idea out here with your eyes a-furtive and your body language a-shiftikins. So smart as you shoved that Cali King right off the edge of a pristine mountain road. Tired of looking at it, unwilling to dispose of it like a grownup, leaving it to fester in the weeds and stink up someone else’s majesty.
You child. You abyss stinker. You coward.
Why do you do this?
Are you embarrassed by the mattress? Is that why? Ohhhh, let me guess. You think this one’s quite good. You must. I mean, why else would you drag that mattress into the middle of a group camp and leave it there? We all see it. We know it’s yours. It’s obvious you’ve been sleeping on it for a long time—there’s the outline of your sweaty body in one clearly definable area. Trust me when I say this. No one wants to see your mattress.
Bad mattress!
“Well actually,” you begin to say, trying to obscure another mattress behind you as you balance it at the edge of a coastal cliff. Let me guess, again. This particular mattress is not a tired idea. It’s completely fresh and you’ve kicked it to fluff it up and now here it is on the edge of Highway 1 and someone else will pick it up, for sure! Someone will want this. It’s practically brand new!
Tire screech.
It’s not. It’s a dusty corpse of a mattress. A yawn coughs out of the fabric as you smack it with your hand.
Perhaps—and I hate to say this, it’s both inflammatory and defamatory—but perhaps I was right in the first place and the mattress IS you? You dump yourself, unasked, into someone else’s project. You dump yourself too much into the middle of your own. You don’t know what to do, so you just dump yourself into your work in a way that’s not conducive to quality. This mattress is snoring its way to the bottom of Yawn Chasm. That, too, is a hard mattress to look at.
Folks, you need to develop GMI—Good Mattress Instinct.
I don’t mean to be able to recognize a good mattress—there is no such thing as a good mattress in a scene. Mottled with the sweat of our beginnings, they ruin everything with their bedbug threats and roach hotel neons. I mean an instinct for recognizing that you’ve dumped one, or that one has been dumped in your work. I’m not assigning blame for the dumping [whistles while looking about] but I am assigning a work order for mattress removal.
Editing.
I’m talking about the importance of self-editing.
You need to develop a Good Mattress Instinct for assessing and editing your work. You need to become an expert at finding all the mattresses in your wild and throwing them into the scow of deletion. You also need to recognize when YOU are being the mattress and wake the eff up.
There is no time for sleeping when mattresses are about!
So.
Listen.
If you read over something you’ve written and each time you trip over a certain section1, or something feels out of place and blottish on your landscape, newsflash: You’ve got a mattress.
If you step back to look at your painting and it feels off-kilter or a little bit ‘extra’, you’ve got a mattress.
If your song drags or something doesn’t feel natural to your ears, guys you’re not being avant-garde—you’ve got a mattress squatting in your melody, livin’ rent-free and easy.
And if you see that mattress and you let that mattress stay—if you persist with it and refuse to acknowledge that you’ve got some Posturepedic-shaped interference—that’s when you’ll know for sure that yes, YOU are in fact the mattress.
Recognizing it is half the battle.
It can be hard to get rid of a mattress. A mattress is heavy and bulky and there’s a certain amount of familiar comfort to it. But dispose of it, you must. Responsibly and with grace. These mattresses are metaphorical mattresses, easily removed. Not like in the real and physical world where their coils and springs and slowly decaying stuffing clogs landfills for eternity.
No, in this world of imagination and creativity you can remove a mattress—idea-based or otherwise—with the click of a key, a dab of paint, an eraser, or a rethink.
I’m talking about editing.
Dial 1-800-GOT-BUNK.
Remove all mattresses from the wild of your work.
If I take my own advice, in the next draft of this there won’t be 40 mattresses.2
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“…there is no avatar I’m sending out to be my photographer. There is no avatar I’m sending out to my real life to have a girlfriend or raise my kid. For me, it’s all one. That’s what I’m hoping for in the work, that we all integrate and just pay attention to someone or spend time with someone who comes from a different social background. We’re not looking for a one-off, or this is my do-gooder self and this is my real world. Do you know what I mean? This is all our lives.”
Loved this quote from photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally from an interview with The Creative Independent on engaging with the world through your work. Read the whole thing. 👍🏻
On Rotation: “One of These Things First” by Nick Drake. I’m just in the mood.
Each little film in This Must Be the Place is quite lovely. The series was a decade ago, but the stories are timeless. A peek into people’s lives. I wasn’t quite sure which one to share, but settled on Frenchie.
Frenchie passed away in 2019, which I found out when I was checking to see if Covid shutdowns had affected any of these niche places, but it survived the gym-ification of Williamsburg only to close after he passed.
Another bummer was finding out Prime Burger closed down in 2012. Its look was so classic! I went there back in the day when I worked on ye olde Madison Avenue in a previous incarnation of myself. After I read that it had closed, I stopped Googling ‘what happened to’ with this series. Progress drags its nails across our hearts sometimes, and personally, I don’t need the scratches right now.
About the series, made by Lost & Found Films:
“THIS MUST BE THE PLACE: There's no place like home. It's where we live, work and dream. It's our sanctuary and our refuge. We can love them or hate them. It can be just for the night or for the rest of our lives. But whoever we may be, we all have a place we call home.”
They’re all here on this one page. Watch ‘em all.
Take a close look. What are you looking at? Congratulations—Galileo just flipped you the bird. Yes, it really is his middle finger, which you can visit at the Museo Galileo in Florence.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Read your work aloud. That’ll quickly show you where mattresses lurk.
Including the title and sub.