A Ramble on Work, Creativity, and Self-Talk: Rough-Edged Errata 1/3
Writing about failing to write to your own specifications, without which words devolve into mere idiosyncratic noise and sometimes, if you're lucky, poetry.
I kinda hate myself for writing this. Can’t help it. It’s too raw, too rough around the edges, somehow still not raw enough to be authentic, somehow never polished enough to be a finished Work of Art.
Faker. Faker. Faker.
It’s hard to believe I could ever be unself-aware or unselfconscious or just plain carefree enough to follow the white rabbit of my own Stream Of Consciousness until something emerged that one could call worthwhile. Worth the cost to my lumbar region. The cost of the writing software subscription, the ergonomic trackball mouse and the gym ball I am perched upon, the resistance bands I twang like an archer with no ammunition to undo the damage of sitting and staring at these words, the bane of my existence as much as they are my salvation.
Impostor.
My SOC has never been so easily overtaken by the voice of reason.
Working Title: Rough Edged or Ruff Around The Edges
My creative pursuits are all anti-authoritarian in nature. Or rather, they want to be. Or rather, I want them to be. As a result all my creative pursuits come to me as a form of procrastination from “paid work,” a reprieve from the soulless rat race.
The science of building a value system that adds up to more love than the sum of its many broken parts—that science is an art.
Writing as procrastination seems like the only way out of the mental trap laid by the conflict of interest that is my SOC. The voice of a reptile brain that says turn away from this foolhardy attempt to be happy on your own terms. Turn towards safety, capital, career. Turn towards the illusive finish line of this animal testing facility disguised as a rat race disguised as a meritocratic democracy.
Working Title: Erratic Errata or Erratum or Rat-Park Errata (meh)
I test the ice with every step, slowed to a crawl, as if the base of Maslow’s pyramid were falling out from under my feet. I can’t self-actualize when I’m scared and I’m scared all the time.
Faker. Impostor.
Left to my own devices, left to sit on my idle hands which the Judeo-Christian template underpinning the whole of our Western civilization taught me are the most potent weapon of mass destruction—left unattended and free to think for themselves, my Edward Scissorhands could kill us all!
These university-educated Edward 40-hands duct-taped to two 40Oz beer bottles will be the death of us. These expert joint-rolling hands. These addicted self-harming hands. These pleasure-seeking, pleasure-giving, mindless jazz-hands with a pathological fetish for manipulating the truth. These awful hands of unimaginable destructive potential with The Devil in every little detail. The Devil in the cuticles and hair follicles. The Devil under the callused leather and cancerous moles. These failing hands misdiagnosed on a daily basis by the hypochondriac brain attached to them that shake and tingle and twitch and drop things all the time. Sharp things. Valuable things. Things that love me. Things that my self-love is built upon like a butterfly perched atop the house of birthday cards I store collapsed in a shoe box to break open in case of emergency when I forget there are people out there who love me.
Maybe writing about not being able to self-actualize is its own form of self-actualization. Maybe writing about feeling worthless will create value through some mysterious alchemy.
Maybe the key word in the colloquial Devil’s Playground is not Devil, but Play.
I'd be interested to see your treatise on content engagement - hence I leave a comment here to boost your engagement score and with it the possibility the algorithm blesses your creation.
Managed to delete the only comment along with my reply to it... Either this UI is not user friendly or I'm getting too old for these newfangled technologies...