Saturday, January 17, 2004
The trip still has me disoriented. I keep expecting to wake up in a hotel room. I have now endured 447 hours of this vacation. I may not be up for much more. I know that on Monday I have to speak with editors and such, vacation or no. And later next week, I have to go to Alabama to visit my familiy, but, after that, I do believe that I will be returning to work. Idleness is a peculiar place to visit, and I'd never frelling live there.
Work is the salvation from the noise inside my head.
Very few other things seem to help at all.
Way back in '92, I began The Five of Cups to muffle the goddamn noise, and discovered that writing worked better than any of the other drugs I'd ever been prescribed or found on my own. For me, it isn't art, though I hope something artful comes of it. And it isn't a burning desire to write, for the sake of writing. It's therapy. It's soundproofing. It's a pressure valve.
Strike a key. Flip a switch. Fill the syringe.
So, all this not writing, which, I'll admit, some difficult part of me needed, is creating a sort of emotional constipation (not the prettiest analogy, but there you go). Day before yesterday, as we were sitting in a restaurant in San Augustine, my right eye began to twitch and it has continued to do so intermittently since then. That means that it's time to write again. Because now I've gone 447 hours (and twelve minutes) without a fix.
Okay, that's a lie. The first week of the vacation I freaked out and spent two nights writing the first chapter of The Girl Who Sold the World for Nebari.Net. Not much more than 2,000 words, but I felt very guilty about it, nonetheless. That seems like ages ago now.
I can only hope I have "re-charged," as Christa might say. I don't feel particularly re-charged, but maybe it doesn't work that way. Maybe one is not conscious of the end of exhaustion. Maybe perpetual exhaustion is merely the price of the drug. As long as it keeps the noise at bay, it's a small enough price.
Last night, Spooky and I watched Mamoru Oshii's Avalon and the special-edition DVD of Escape from New York. Avalon was much better than I'd expected (I wasn't terribly impressed by Ghost in the Shell), and not nearly so derivative of The Matrix as I'd feared. In some ways, it actually reminded us more of The City of Lost Children and Michael Radford's brilliant production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. No doubt, much of this followed from the bleak Polish locales and the art direction and costume design. As for Escape from New York, I admit I found the stuff with the terrorist crashing a plane into a building just east of the World Trade Center disarmingly prescient. I'd not seen the film since before 9/11. I haven't yet begun investigating all the extras on the disc. After the movies, we played Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando until just after 4 a.m.
Remember. Buy it now on eBay and you get a little monster doodle.
|
|
