intentions

I open the Word document entitled "my book." It's yet to have a proper name. I peruse it, correct a few typos and reword a few phrases before succumbing to the attention-deficit disorder technology has bestowed upon me.. I watch videos and look at fuzzy-headed pictures of baby Beau. I organize my artwork, dragging thumbnails into various tattoo-related folders. I find a long-lost archive of Suicide Girls photos and enjoy that for a brief moment before realizing it's probably wrong to be looking at naked women while listening to "The Buddha" on tv. Maybe you go to Buddhist hell for doing those things. I quickly close the folder and wander off again via mouse-click. The biopic gives me so much food for thought that I am unable to retain any as I clean out my inbox. I write a couple e-mails. I pull out the necessary materials for the various Christmas-present art projects I am working on... and I begin messing with my phone. I curse the angry little birds for preying on my weaknesses and siphoning away hour after hour. A friend calls, another friend texts. I put on one of the various horror movies I DVR'd during October, and pay attention only enough to note that it's a shameless rip-off of The Shining.
Just now is when the kid is due to start going "Redrum. Redrum!!"... but this time he stays silent.
Now she finds that the "book" he's been writing is nothing but gibberish.
And... now he has an axe.
Wouldn't you know, it's stuck in a door.
I predict a chase scene through the outdoor landscape.
I look through amazing amateur photos from National Geographic. I look up reference photos and save them for art I'm not making. I make the mistake of logging onto youtube and it pours gasoline on my already frenzied inattention, wildly jumping from one topic to the next in 1:45 second clips.

Night after night I do nothing. And I do enjoy it so.
Our world is so chock full of stimuli. There is SO much going on around us and available to us at every moment of our existence. And so much of it I find so very alluring. So deliciously distracting. We have created a world in which it is - in actuality - almost possible to avoid our very own thoughts! It is almost possible to stop feeling.

We haven't accomplished it yet. But we'll keep trying.

It's easy to justify this "time wasted" as meditative in itself. Meditation is shutting off one's thoughts, right? Isn't my mindless crop-harvesting on Farmville the same?
No. Not really. It's certainly not for my betterment.
It's good for a break from life, yes. And it's good to have means for a break. But then... we have to get back to life. Back to thinking and feeling and growing.

When I say "we" I actually just mean "I."

I told someone a couple of months ago that I might need to go away for a few weekends in order to write this book. Go to some isolated cabin in the mountains with no wireless coverage and leave my cell-phone in the car. Lock myself in a cozy warm room and Just. Write.

God it sounds great.
And so hard. I fear I need forcible isolation in order to harness my so easily-enticed spirit. To separate myself from all the delectable distractions that I relish in order to create something that I relish even more. Something I can be proud of.


I set this blog about being distracted aside after becoming too distracted to finish it. I'll come back in the morning, I said.
I did. At 4:45 p.m.
Again I'm surrounded by drawing materials, again I'm flipping back and forth between this and Facebook, Hotmail and Farmville... a friend calls and I talk to her for a while, after which I fill out a volunteer application for the NE Aquarium. And it's now 6:24 and I've still written nothing.

Time is ticking away. And that's fine. It's good! We want it to keep moving, as the alternatives sound much more frightening indeed. But it's still scary to feel time moving so quickly, to feel it slipping through our hands like grains of sand. It's frightening to every week, every month, every year say "where did the time go?" Time will tick away no matter what I do with it. But I am going to continue writing and.... when I get around to it... I will spend some time reflecting on the past year and the year to come. That's what I intended to write this blog about.

There will be more blogs to come.
Blogs about things. Not blogs about nothing or disjointed blogs or blogs that stop in mid-sent