Alternate Designation: Are You Telling Me That This Sucker Is Nuclear?
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The last fifteen work days, I kept finding myself cubicle-bound and staring at my hands. Agitated and about four "Fuck-Me's" away from some silly meltdown where I pretend my monitor is a punching bag. Where my stomach reminds me of every damaged enzyme of collegiate glory. Where I become a ragged Elmo doll, vibrating, giggling, and stating that this hell of a career tickles me in some kind of lustrous S&M way.
The fairy tale used to go that when I got on the train after work, I'd fall asleep and wake up on the other side of my life. The land where the concept of hope was a boy band, and I was a teenage fan screaming for a piece. Home—the land where the previous paragraph was nothing but distant radar blips. But as I approach the ripe old age of 30, my creative dreams have become a little heavier to carry after work. Some days, I cannot make that transition a productive one.
The cubicle burn is not being healed by the home ointment. So it's time I stop along the road in-between.
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With a novel in the can and a fully operational battle station website, I got a bit more promise than someone ten years my senior with neither. But having promise is superficial, it's like having the world's most magnificent phallus and being unable to display it on film. And damn it, that's the last thing I want to have. Wait a second... ah, forget that one.
All promise aside, I've become very aware of the harsh contrast between a stressing workplace and a relaxing home life. If you have too much of both, your creativity suffers. Only someplace arbitrary can cure this. Someplace that has the best of both worlds. Such a place would be a happy hour for the creative psychotic. But how do you find something that does not exist? Easy. You make it from scratch.
Article comments
1 - John Bil
Here is my pitch, yawn.
2 - Mark Sahm
JB: Forgot to say thanks for following the Official Comment Policy while you were trolling.
3 - Elvira Black
Mark:
This puts me in mind of an essay by the late, great novelist Virginia Woolf called "A Room of One's Own." If memory serves, it was an entreaty for Victorian women of a creative bent to have the means and opportunity to have a space where they could be far from the madding crowd for a spell.
Unfortunately, though Woolf did create some extraordinary works, she was intermittenly psychotic, and wound up putting rocks in her pocket and walking into the sea at or around the outbreak of WW I. I'm a sometime psychotic myself, but I tend to stay away from the ocean during these interludes.
Nevertheless, I think you've got something here--sounds like an idea whose time has come!
4 - Mark Sahm
You know, after I wrote this post, I was disappointed with it, and chalked it up as a concept gone askew. It's part of having a lot of blog posts.
However, little did I know that others were thinking about the same concept" but instead of lamenting on it like myself" they made it a reality. Check out this link I found last month:
NY Times Article from 10/9/05
One of the places even opened 2 days before I wrote this article!
I guess the point I was reminded of is this: ideas are being taken at an accelerated rate. Innovation is in short supply. I'm reminded that right now, there are probably a hundred people writing a novel just like the one I'm working on now. Maybe even a thousand.
But the champion of any idea is the person who gets there first and makes the most impact. Leaving the followers to just look like copycats even if they were working on development at the same time. Unless of course, they steal the original design and improve on it.
Nevertheless, this is the reason why we, as creative people, can't afford to sit around and watch TV, why we need to overcome our laziness and distractions and work harder on our art and writing.
Otherwise we will be infinitely stuck in this corporate cubicle-bound existence... instead of being able to escape to a creative one.
*end rant*
Thanks for commenting.