There's nothing more annoying than falling into a creative ennui. It's one thing not to care about what someone else has to say; it's something entirely different when you don't care what you have to say. Kind of a bummer. Not that I haven't tried, mind you. I attempted to force out a post the other day, but all that appeared was a small sliver of story that, to be honest, I don't know what to do with:
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In the morning, John woke to find everything as it was when he fell asleep the night before. This disturbed him, because he distinctly remembered tidying up. Yes, that towel had been put in its spot on the top left-hand shelf in the closet, and he definitely remembered dusting the thin, silver layer of dust off of the dark brown wood of the desktop. He had dusted it just before playing tiddlywinks with the clever, orange jackrabbits that had popped out of his slippers as they sang.-----
“Oh, ho!” John laughed to himself, “it was just another dream! I really must stop eating mustard before bedtime.”
John went about his morning routine, humming quietly under his breath. He didn't notice that he was humming the song from his recently remembered dream; what really bothered him was whether it had been the jackrabbits that had been singing, or if it might have been his slippers.
Perhaps one day I'll finish the story.
I was talking to one of my regulars at work this afternoon...
Not to rabbit-trail too much, but one of the pleasures of working a customer service job is establishing a rapport with strangers, understanding them without a context, only to discover intriguing facets about them that completely re-frame your understanding of their identity.
In this case, I knew a regular to be an employee of a popular all-natural, hippie-type kind of grocery store. We would chat some, but there weren't really any hooks on which to hang a real conversation. Today, I dropped some eaves on a break, and found that he was an astrologer. So, of course, in true rube fashion, I immediately asked him what sign I seemed like.
Fortunately, my asinine request was interrupted. There was a storm blowing in, lightening was crackling mere miles away; the escalating wind threatened to play Mary Poppins with the shade umbrellas. The first smatterings of rain came in horizontally. Throngs of people who had been enjoying a hot summer's day suddenly realized that they were in real danger of being swept away.
Everyone made it inside. The only casualties were two lattes and an ashtray. The conversation resumed, but with the vigor of the chase. He was thinking of marketing his astrological consulting a bit stronger, perhaps with a website or some such. I'm not sure how, but that segued into me trying to connect with that sentiment. I tried to describe my state of mind, the self-proclaimed ennui, that I had arrived at a mental crossroads and didn't know which way to turn.
I wasn't asking for a reading, or even for advice...
I was just kind of
talking.
He looked at me and simply said, “I think a lot of people are at a crossroads.
Maybe we just need to be at the crossroads
for a while.”
