Man. It’s been a rough few days or years, and I’m still tired.
This week’s big new* idea involved deleting most of the scrolly apps off my phone and trying to replace them with reading e-books on my phone. Unlike any of the countless previous times that I’ve tried this kind of thing, it’s definitely going to work this time, really…!
For the last 48 hours or so (and probably at least 18 more to come…!), I’ve been reading short stories by Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick instead of scrolling Reddit. In the moment, as I’m doing it, I have some semi-conscious awareness that this thing I’m doing is reading, and the things I’m reading are written by real authors whose published bodies of work contain other things that some folks would categorize as literature, which makes my brain crackle with sparks of self-righteous dopamine. At first, it was just a quick short story here and there; I’d read one to help me get out of bed and one to take the edge off if I was feeling a bit stressed at work. I should have recognized the familiar pattern, as I started reading more frequently and finishing multiple short stories back to back. I found myself thinking about the things I’d been reading earlier, and looking forward to another hit of this literature stuff. In less than a week’s time, the cumulative brain-tingles of my literature consumption were already approaching the critical mass that could trigger an episode of inspiration.
By the time I noticed how fast I was careening toward the edge, it was too late to change course and the first hundred words or so of this blog post had spilled forth from my keyboard, forming a manic introduction to a story that I’m not going to tell you, because that’s what the blog post is actually about. Riding a literature-induced high of tingly-brained I can do that vibes, I had first set for myself a goal of writing an entire new short story of my own and posting in on my blog, in a single night. But, as reality feebly attempted to work its tendrils into the wrinkly lump of tissue that produces my flawed judgement, it managed to gain just enough of a grasp to steer me in a slightly less ambitious direction, and I had the brilliant realization that my old notebooks have a number of short stories written in them that have never been read by anyone other than myself, and it would be much more efficient of me to simply transcribe some of my existing art than to try and produce a new original work with such tight time constraints.
The story I planned to share tonight came out of some thinking about what it means to be an artist, about producing art, and most importantly, about the importance of sharing that art with others— what good is it to be an artist, if you hide all your works and never share them? I imagined up a story about an old man who has passed away, leaving an impressive estate. A number of distant relatives come out of the woodwork, each interested in claiming some bit of inheritance despite not having kept in contact while he was still alive. As the estate is emptied of valuables, someone discovers that one wing of the house is full of fine paintings, stacked several deep along the walls. It turns out the old man was secretly a master painter who had produced an impressive body of work over several decades, but kept it all hidden and never shared his creations with anyone.
That story is sitting in a notebook somewhere; it’s probably fairly close to where I’m sitting right now, and not difficult to find, but I thought I had saved a picture of it somewhere, and I couldn’t find the picture on my computer, so now I’m writing a blog article (longer than the story itself) about the story that I couldn’t find. I think it counts as ironic that while looking through my saved photos, I stumbled across a picture of a different story that I wrote, a story written on a tablet with a quick-erase button, a story that was doomed to be forgotten, a story that I shouldn’t have taken a picture of, but I did, because I was afraid I wouldn’t remember it otherwise.
