You Will Turn Away

I'm usually too self-conscious or too lazy to write much, even knowing how good it is for the soul. On my latest flight across the Atlantic, though, I was very pleased to find myself unable to stop. I'd like to share some of those writings with you, despite my aforementioned hesitancy. Here are some thoughts on the creative process and of the real bitch in can be.


Do away with distraction.

At first you may be horrified by the sight of your atrophied dream, the pitiful state of your embryonic destiny. You will hear one thousand mocking voices and one million I-told-you-so's. You will want more than anything to turn away; to eat, to sleep, to clean, to hang-out, to drink, to fuck, to fuck-off, to tweet and facebook and rot comfortably back in front of your macbook pro. You will do anything to mute those desperate whimpers, the laments of your soul. You will turn away. You will cover up your embarrassment and shrink from the truth; you will cower and hide and reach for a snickers bar. It will be too much to bear and you will return to the sick and poisoned breast of your false mother.

Some time goes by, you frolicking about in a sort of complacent, happy stupor, until again, you notice a dull pain deep in your stomach, though this time slightly more pronounced than last. Like a toothache it won't go away; it will be insistent, nagging - more bothersome than painful. Eventually, you can't help it and you must scratch the itch. You drag your eyes from the fanfare around you and rest them on the blank page, the creative act... and this, slowly, becomes a mirror, a reflection of your true inner state.

As the image comes into focus, thoughts, emotions, fears, ghosts, sorrows and joys hurtle towards you intent on ripping the layers of shit you've covered yourself in off of your body. They want to splice you open; to bleed you, to break and shatter you. What they want is to make you anew. What they want is to open you wide so that you can drink in the universe and birth the world. What they want is to show you your true, manifold face.

Your coddled, conditioned mind will not like this, will thrash about like a fish on land and throw childish tantrums. But you will get, through the tumult, a taste of your most glorious nature. This torrent, this godlike blast of real shit will threaten to break you open and it will scare you to hell. Actually, it'll scare you into turning away once more, and you flip open your netflix to watch the next Office episode.