hauled out from ‘about me’

(Verbatim transcription from 11/22/18 Morning Pages, unless in parentheses)

I need an office. Maybe this is it, the old Cushman (kitchen) table and my stuffed up computer and papers all over the ping-pong table. It’s not romantic, but it probably has to do. Anyway, I need an office in which to keep and add research, and pin-up inspirational and grounding quotes and sayings and mantras and directives, where they whistle out for me to take a look every time I show up for work again.

Which is a key point, my office is about creativity and so most, way most of the time and effort expended in it which is to say every time I come down here, is a sharp focus on what’s important, what’s necessary, what will matter most. I probably need a pin-up on the wall that asks – “Have you fallen into a rabbit hole?” Yeah, I need that. Because those hours of succumbing to the enticement of distraction and evasion and the easier softer way generally waylay – if not sink – the intention to do what is most important.

So I need an office in which I will come with intention, devotion, and duty to keep my own promises, to see with a clear eye, to will myself – and it’s not too difficult – into some temporary state of amazement and stimulation which – for those minutes, even hours – takes me either completely outside myself or maybe all the way into myself, and I (fall into) the vivid and continuous dream, as John Gardner says makes for all fictional writing that truly works, engages and holds with the act of storytelling, and I’m thinking the story can be entirely made up – fiction – or entirely squeezed out of my life, currently blogging.

And for this, it is plain to see, I need not only an office – cause likely I already have one since I could easily find myself living where I had no such call it bountiful space like the basement here, yes, I need an office and I need a commitment, call it a burning desire, a need, an entirely unavoidable personal imperative to do the work. Because the work, I know, will be honest and true and it will matter, what Thoreau said about the ability to change the day – make it better – and that feels like duty – my duty – these days when some darkness never feels very far away (over the planet).

Like Harry Nilsson’s “Me and My Arrow” I need an office. Me and my office.