Procrastinationland

I’m almost done with my book. I’m almost done with my EP. But there’s something holding me back: I love procrastination!

Ever since I can remember, I never wanted to finish anything. Making piles of projects for me was akin to building a beautiful nest and then flying away to build an even more beautiful nest. In the end, I never had a nest to sleep in, but I always had something to fall back on when I was bored, or sad, or magically maintained a burst of creative energy. I could blame this on obvious ADHD, poor self esteem, or laziness, but I think it's something deeper. As a materialist, I find a deep connection to the art I create and think I want to hold into it forever. In inhibiting myself from finishing, I feel perpetually engrossed in an ocean of work. It’s so much easier to say “I’m writing a book” for eight years than to give birth to the book. It’s so much easier to fuck around on my guitar and play new riffs than to look at what I’ve been working on for the last four years and settle it down on a track. I am realizing now in life that in the same way I have spent a great deal of time running away from my problems to new environments, I have been running away from my artistic obligations to myself. This pattern of stuck-ness has manifested so deeply That I started to do a course with my best friend about how to get unstuck…Only to now find myself running away from the book itself.

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(Me at 6, probably procrastinating homework)

The moon is pregnant, my mind is running. The tiger Lillys are wilting in the back yard. There is some wild animal pissing on the wildflowers I keep trying to grow. The sweet maintenance man in our apartment gave us a table and umbrella to enjoy the summer because he was so happy we mowed the yard for him. I love to mow the yard. I love to sweep the litter from around my cat’s shitter. I love to do the dishes. I love to do anything other than create the art I know so deeply I was meant to create. The sun beats down in a way that makes me lethargic. When winter comes I will say the same thing with the cold. I will say the ice is inside of my bloodstream and I can’t move. The truth is that I need to embrace the monotony associated with creation and just finish the fucking thing you were supposed to finish.

If you were ever waiting for a sign to finish your work, it’s here. It’s my words. It’s the melancholy stranger you stared at on public transportation. It’s the child you saw in the park that made you feel something visceral that happened to you when you were too young to protect memories. It’s the last meal someone who loves you made. It’s the blades of grass that make your ankles itch and the sand that permeates your car after the beach. Most days I want to give up and never make anything ever again. I want to sit in my sloppy pajamas and eat an egg and cheese sandwich and watch horrible television that was meant to rot me dry and I want to feel mindlessly numb because I feel like that’s all I deserve in this life. The truth is we all deserve an awful lot more than that sorry loss. We deserve to find meaning in the awesome and mundane.

When I started writing again, it felt cathartic to myself. I felt as though I was able to journal freely alone in this vast web of the internet. The truth is, it has brought me closer to people who are like minded that I have connected with throughout my lifetime. I can’t tell you how many people have actually reached out to me and told me they enjoyed writing my words. While I obviously feel flattered about this, what made me much happier is that a lot of them said it gave them inspiration to begin their own writing or creative endeavors.

We are all writers. We are all artists, philosophers and creators of not just content, but experiences, perspectives, hopes and disappointments. These statements themselves are cheesy but they are objectively true. The art we create doesn't have to be good to be appreciated, it just needs to be authentic to our own beliefs, and 9 times out of 10, someone will be able to relate. We can listen to the nagging awful losers telling us that artificial intelligence is coming for everything sacred and holy and there’s no point in creating anything because it’s going to steal our jobs or our art or our music or our soul OR we can just do it. The stupid computer robot is going to copy you anyway, so you might as well do it because for now you can breathe and cry and kiss and articulate and your body is full of blood and tissues and you came from a womb and will return to the earth and the robot computer can’t do that (yet) so it doesn’t understand us on that mammalian level. So the next time I see you or hear from you, please don’t tell me how you are. Tell me what you are working on, and tell me what you are creating. I would like to believe that you are all creating something, and I would very much like to see it. And tell me to finish my book. And we can share our creations with the hopes there will be many more to ponder and appreciate.