i want to feel in control of the structure of my day, i’m thinking to myself.
if i have an idea of what i want to achieve from my day off, then i won’t experience listlessness or depression later on, when the caffeine has worn away and i have spent my energies. that’s different from the empty barrel i become after a work day, when the thoughts ricochet around and are ultimately lost. it reminds me of playing tennis in a dream — hitting the the ball against a racquet with every scrap of skill you can manage, except the ball soars a frustrating arc over the net and falls shy of your shadowy target, bouncing perhaps once and rolling into a pile of leaves. and the leaves don’t happen to be crunchy whatsoever, which even in my imagining of this silly hypothetical situation leaves me speechless with rage.
if i know myself well enough, it’s that comforting thoughts about productivity don’t help me, and despite sometimes achieving a lot in a day, i can still be plagued by emptiness and ennui like there’s something fundamentally wrong. so it goes : i wrote today, but did i write anything worth a damn? did i write something worth publishing, worth earning my keep? do i need to write to make something good, or just to practise? i baked another cake of nothingness. or, i simply poured an assortment of ideas into the mixer and came out with a slightly warped result that i could call an accomplishment.
e.g. sadboi chronicles (give yourself a gold star edition)
nothing’s worse than anticipation.
nothing is worse than daylight savings.
nothing makes me sadder than producing stories about my own solitude.
nothing’s worse than seeing you look rough, like a backtracking insect.
i’m looking forward when i want to cup the present in my hands.
i’m going to surround it and drag it through the clay.
you could say that this blog is ironic, as it’s usually deadlined by me and gives a more or less tangible result. that’s the fine line between getting in your own way when you want to encourage and develop your skills, or just strong-arming yourself into producing an object that’s valuable, probably to prove more to others than yourself.
when singer fiona apple released “extraordinary machine” in 2005, more than five years after her sophomore record, there are more than a few talk show interviews on letterman, craig ferguson and the like interrogating her on her absence. what did you do in that time? they ask her. nothing, really, she replies. you have hobbies, right? the crowd laughs nervously, and apple shrugs. in some interviews she mentions watching a lot of tv, or enjoying doing nothing. the final song on ‘extraordinary machine’ is about exactly that:
if you don’t have a date
celebrate
go out and sit on the lawn
and do nothing
’cause it’s just what you must do and
nobody does it anymore
the song, called ‘waltz (better than fine)’ is partly about friends of apple concerned by her stasis. the tune of the song has a dreaminess to it that conjures images of old hollywood dances, or tinkering with a piano over hours, and brings me to a place where i can imagine lying in a warm summery backyard, enjoying the passage of time in the grass. it almost feels wrong. but it isn’t. i think more about the situation where i justify the way i’m spending myself.