Sometimes when I’m particularly bored or particularly procrastinating, I read about various proclamations of my personality. Partly it makes me feel good about myself (because pretty much all my personality profiles say that I’m smart and sexy and basically awesome, which I am, so that’s cool) and partly it helps me conceptualize myself from a perspective outside my own. I have a problem pretty often where I’m unable to see other perspectives, instead replacing the perspectives of those around me with my own. I expect a lot of people, at least in certain areas, mostly because it’s what I expect of myself. I’ll assume that certain people possess the same knowledge that I do, or the same frame of experience that informs that knowledge. I even often assume a similar vocabulary.
I’m sure I’ve written this before. It’s about the same sort of semi-hubris pridestuff that both fuels and unsettles me. Blah blah I can’t tell if I’m arrogant anymore and I’m not sure I feel bad about it. I highly doubt this is a relatable story. Here’s a more relatable story, I hope:
I’m sitting in a 89 degree house with a single box fan on me at 1:44 in the morning drinking store brand apple soda with a shot of vodka in it. I could probably sleep now but I’m choosing not to for reasons that aren’t wholly clear to me. I’m writing this very sentence instead. How meta. The A/C’s line is frozen, which according to the internet could mean a couple of things, from a lack of Freon to clogged filters. There should be someone out to fix it tomorrow, but in the meantime it’s heat city indoors. Not that I really mind. This isn’t that bad. I’ve got a box fan running now even.
Summer five-ish years ago was pretty hot and I was absolutely mortified of having to pay the electricity for air conditioning because I had little enough money as it was. I just spent a lot of time naked with a floor fan and took a ton of cold showers, since water was free. Same thing in the winter. Cold? Take a hot shower. It’s pretty amazing how well it works.
Three years of New Orleans later and the heat doesn’t really phase me. Sure it’s unpleasant, but I took a walk about 2 miles today just to grab lunch and get back and I didn’t really feel like I was dying.
Anyway before this gets into more rambling about heat, I’m going to get to the point of this essay, which is creativity. The creative process is a tortured sort of thing that works differently for every living being on this planet, including a complete lack of creativity by some. For me, the process is about compulsion. Maybe I’ll be awake one night late into the night staring at personality profiles and feel the urge to write no matter the heat. Maybe I’ll go two weeks without thinking at all about anything past whatever happens to me day to day. Maybe what happened with the unending beaddventure review will happen and I’ll start to write and then peter out and realize I have pretty much nothing to say. Who knows! Not me, that’s for damn sure. On the one hand maybe I should be jealous of people with a good work ethic. The kind of people who can diligently work day after day churning out word after word of a project and ultimately culminate in some kind of impressive finished work. I don’t know. I don’t really think they’ve got a handle on the process either, since so much of it is about forcing themselves to just get something onto the page.
Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it flows out of them like a broken dam. I wouldn’t know: that kind of consistency is wholly outside my experience. The point is, I write when I can, not when I should, and when I can write is pretty uncommon. Maybe after a drink. Maybe when I’m woozy and halfway heat stricken. Maybe only after 1 am or midnight or something. Maybe only when I’m in love. Maybe only when I’m not in love.
Here is probably a good place for a nugget of wisdom or a peal of truth or a bauble of rectitude. I don’t really have any for you tonight, and I’m not sure I ever did. The more I end up living, the less happy I am with anything anywhere and if I don’t know how to be happy, I don’t know how to make you happy either. Heck it’s not that bad. But it really is. Comprende?
Veering away from relatability again.
I am constantly saving the things I write to various places on and offline, and I’ve kept every school notebook I’ve written in for the last fiveish years. I’m doing this because I hope to one day be so famous and so successful that my myriad writings are considered valuable resources for studying my vast intellect and spurious character. Sometimes I think about convincing people I’m actually immortal and know everything. Sometimes I want to adopt the character of some obscure spirit or foreign god and march about demanding kow-tow (and later reciprocating, of course) and generally make a nuisance of myself.
I have trouble determining whether all of this is delusions of grandeur or just raw ambition manifesting in idle fantasies, but nevertheless on the offchance I do become very famous and endlessly debatable, the endless doodlings and scribbly notetakings and some small portion of the pining that has made it to print will be available for public consumption. At time of death too, unlike Twain’s 100 year clause. The prospect of actually earning that fame fills my mind with dread, though. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. That’s the third reason I read personality profiles: hoping to get some sense of how to make my life, how to make me work.
