This is for me.
This is for the restless mind drifter reaching for the remote instead of reason. This is for the one who drifts toward the fantasy of a silent mind, surviving on nothing but the inertia of the status quo. Achieving nothing, surprising nobody. Simply slipping off the radar and onto the one true road of forgettability. It’s easier. Just another nothing person doing nothing and having done nothing, moving on. Focus is a fallacy and procrastination, the easiest of all yoga poses.
Reset. New line.
This is for that person there. Me again. The one who hears the clock—fears the clock—the deafening clang of the digital, mechanical, and spiritual. Shudders at the tick-tock of nothing getting done and age tacking up another shingle on this, my leaking roof of potential. Time time time. There is none, and yet, it is all there is. The one true constant. The only thing you can rely on. It screams like a wounded animal in the backyard of my consciousness. I watch the blood of it drain away upon my lawn with an acute awareness of my frivolous existence. I do. Nothing.
Reset. New line.
This is for the dreamer. The once was dreaming. The dreamt. Closing eyes and remembering this forgotten orb of light, pricking the skin of it and watching it bleed a rainbow. Me again. See my pool of mind-swirl, alive with ideas and sense and fearlessness as I desperately seek the plug. Glug-glug. Later. I’ll come back to it. Glug. I’ll do it after this thing I’m doing for this other person. Glug-gurgle. After my bank balance says this particular number. Gurgle-gone. Empty-headed, reality bitten, and yet, and yet…, overflowing with need and memory and magic. Do dreams die, or just lay dormant, like mines planted on Nostalgia Road, ready to detonate—to explode?
Reset. New line.
This is for the one who does not speak—thinks they have nothing to say and so says nothing. Does nothing. Again. This is for me. Keeps all the words chained in the attic. Nasty warden in a self-doubt cap, keys jangling on a long chain. “Lock yourself up lest you be known,” says the warden, rapping a truncheon against my door. “Someone might find out who you really are, then what? Exposed as a fraud it’s to the gallows for your sins? hooray!” This fear of being found out, a gruel I eat by the heaping helping. This is a page taken from a keep yourself secure, buttoned up, and alone playbook. It is called: Survival of the Most Secretive.
Reset. New line.
This is for me.
Resetting.
This is my remembrance of purpose. My reanimating of a dream. Exposing myself to the troubles and vowing to use procrastination yoga as a flex, not a fault.
This is me sharing more, saying more, and writing me to you. This is being completely open to the process and looking to mine it for gems. My gems. The rock candy of me.
This is me.
Writing it down.
This is you, watching me write it down.
There is a word.
The word is prolific.
Prolific is the word with the keys to my car. The word that has no brakes and no GPS to guide it. With it at the wheel, there can be no more driving under the influence of fear or self-doubt. No more, no more, no more. And yet more and more work must pass. Quoth1 the Maven: “Evermore.”
Not productive, you understand—prolific. Productive can easily become busywork. Prolific is purposework. Learn and build and repeat and on and on and because of it, get better.
Prolific is not perfection. Prolific is practice.
To be prolific is to explore the outer limits of your craft and the inner edges of your mind. To find what’s there and ship it off to work for you.
This is for me.
This is my yell into a 44-gallon drum that smells of imagination fuel and this is me inhaling the echo.
New chapter.
Prolific. I will be prolific.2
I wrote this for me.
But you’re welcome to it.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen3
This week’s amends…
“My approach to what I do in my job—and it might even be the approach to my life—is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something—a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.”
- Mads Mikkelsen, “In Conversation: Mads Mikkelsen”, Vulture
Via Kottke
On Rotation: “When I’m Small” by Phantogram
YouTube description:
“Five friends recount what life was like in Brooklyn in the nineteen-seventies—from the games they played in the street to the criminal elements they tried to avoid—in this short film by Cristina Costantini and Alfie Koetter.”
Via Kottke
No, you’re not dreaming. These are the Hobby Horse Championships
Via Messy Nessy 13 Things I Found on the Internet Today
Quoth the Raven, but flipped.
While I don’t think you need a guide on how to become prolific, I usually like to attach some article on the subject, so here’s one.
In the subscriber email intro to this post, I mentioned how I was mapping out a calendar for the year with a vision for this publication and what potential paid content could be (this writing will always be free), and how personal projects could be included. I miss my Speed Poetry project, for example, so things like that maybe? Open to suggestions.
This is just what I needed today...thank you