I figure I'm just the laziest motherfucker on this planet.
That's what brings me here at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning gwaping at a computer screen while subjecting my neighbours to my most recent John Mayer compilation. (Ironically featuring 'Midnight' a track dedicated to insomnia and urban alienation. Good theme.)Now the thought swirling around in my brain, mystifying the fuck out of me is: Where do all my good intentions go?
Today was supposed to be about creative exploration. Today I was supposed to turn a slowly moulting mountain of gateway paper representing 8 years worth of doodles and ideas and rough drafts into at least one actual artwork.
Instead I took a nap that lasted 6 hours.
The narcolepsy is just a reaction. The real problem is writer's block, or my version of it, anyway. This is an abject, paralysing fear of commencing, of committing, of eventually fucking up SO badly in SO many ways that they'd need a whole new decimal system to quantify it.
It's like stepping off a cliff...once you 're airborne, you don't know how far you're going to drop and what shape you'll be in when you land. The average person tends to put it off for as long as he or she can.
The good news (I'm guessing)is that I'm not alone! We are a generation of procrastinators and lazy motherfuckers!!(how else do you explain the grammar in text messages and the tomaguchi phenomenon?) To avoid doing any real work we have all perfected a whole host of ingenious evasive strategy.
I know people who, everytime they need to begin a new project, will defer the inevitable by attempting to re-organize their entire CD collection - alphabetically, or chronologically, or based on favourites, or based on which bands had members who had maternal aunts named Gertie.
Spending an hour plucking your eyebrows(with toe-nail clippers),scraping the grunge off the grouting in the kitchen tiles with a toothpick, trying to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes (even though you don't smoke), volunteering to make absurd market runs (you've just discovered that there are no spark plugs in the house - horror of horrors), meditating upon the whorls and lines on the soles of your feet to see if you can find any hidden alphabets spelling 'Paul is dead', these are all acceptable evasion tactics.
Now the question is, has Humanity always been such a bunch of putter-offers, of procrastinators, of slackers or is it just our generation?
Like, I wonder if Plato had to play 249 games of solitaire before he sat himself down to write the Republic.
Or if Einstein would spend an hour combing his facial hiar into animal shapes to add to his bag of party tricks before he went to work on the theory of relativity.
Can you imagine Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount: "Water. Wine. Water. Wine...no, water. hic!! hee hee no, th-hass wine."
It's a wonder anything got done!
Notice by the way, how in true diabolical fashion, I have managed to defer my start up problems by making them yours...What? do you see any finished artwork lying around the place?
