standstill

It was quite enlightening, sitting there, listening to each of my friends relate all their current and prospective creative work (for profit or non-profit, as Carl put it). As each person rattled off all plans and schedules, I realized that I was nowhere approaching capacity as a creator.

In fact, I am at a creative standstill.

It is not a matter of whether or not I have ideas. I do have them, a few quite exciting, perhaps one or two even potentially wonderful. However, I find myself mired down by the circumstances of my life – which normally would be great stuff to mine and craft, set down and polish – unable to pursue thoughts to their multi-path endings, unwilling to commit the time and effort to actually write. Where Jason has brain vomit, I feel the nausea of disinterest. Where Vin fights time to write with passion, I raise my eyebrows at the paucity of my computer screen. Where El considers the approach to a year-long commitment, I cannot begin to consider any work entailing more than ten minutes of my life.

It is as if I cannot go beyond the arc of my arm’s reach; the very thought of motion immediately draining me before I even begin.

As such, what I have on my plate just sits there, perfectly transfixed, plastic displays of various menu items in a Japanese restaurant. I cannot bear to even look at them, they’ve suddenly lost all appeal to me, aesthetic or otherwise.

Instead, I find myself thinking in staccato bursts. Fireworks that rise and flare in mere seconds abruptly lighting my consciousness before just as quickly fading into the night sky – all potential of beauty not even recognized by the lone observer who cannot even be moved to comment.

The longest form I can do right now is poetry, and only very short verse at that, written in first person, with a minimum of imagery – concrete or otherwise – setting monologues as prose poems with no hope of truly creating anything; just wanting to write something, anything, to keep up the discipline, to burn away time.

I began a play about a crippled girl who returns to her mother’s province. So she’s there, in the little antique store talking to the shopkeeper, and I find their conversation banal, uninteresting fluff.

The other new play about two sisters who struggle with the death of their father faltered as well. Most of the time, they just didn’t want to talk, and I am not the kind of playwright who sets action onstage bereft of words. It came to the point that I thought “Well, if you don’t want to talk, I certainly don’t want to write about you girls sitting around looking like Chekovian wannabe’s”.

The short stories I’m writing became tawdry showcases of technique, each rushing to the finish line – heartless, soulless and mute, just running for the sake of running. I’d rather not watch.

Really, it is as if words have lost their glamour.

That, or I’m just being lazy.

Or too pointedly sad.