Sometimes my creative thoughts sort of spin in place, kicking up an ever widening circle of brain dust, instead of moving forward. An example: the way I tend to write a bunch of beginnings of an article and then slowly work on more than one of them until the best one suddenly announces itself. Or the way I’m sitting here with numerous versions of the same section of a book proposal and instead of moving on to the next section I keep tinkering slightly with all of them. I tell myself it’s part of my creative process—because I’m creative and this is my process—and yet I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t do this? I imagine I’d have more time.
Last night while totally not wasting time on the internet I stumbled across this post by Michael Ian Black which I thought was fascinating. I identified with it enormously and thought he was brave to put it all into words. I had no idea he felt this way about his level of success—I think of him as someone’s who’s successful, hilarious, well-respected and who’s unquestionably “made it”—and yet upon reading this I realized how naive those initial thoughts were because everything in this business is relative and infinite and it’s incredibly hard to keep in mind anything you’ve achieved and derive satisfaction from it because by the time it hits you’re already thinking about how you should be on some other level or in some other realm.
I have more to say about this but in the interest of getting actual work done today instead I’ll tell you that last night I had a great dream where on my kitchen table was a bag of clean laundry—my laundry—it had been cleaned without my even having to take it to get cleaned! And while I’m sure this is about some deep shit possibly involving figurative “dirty laundry,” I also think it’s sad and funny that this was a great dream.