A Burned Out Shell of Creativity Unspent
It occurred to me as I was flipping through tik-tok ingesting my AI and ASD and downfall of civilization news that I haven't been here lately to send out an update. I could have sworn I had written a post discussing how incredibly addled I was by the bombardment of surreal headlines better (formerly) surfaced by the likes of Onion news. To see such headlines in reputable news sources alongside the very real environmental and socioeconomic disasters being felt globally, and the encroachment of war and conflict across borders previously relatively sound... surely I'm a background character in a satire being played out on the global stage.
No, no satire. Just a love story trying to exist in a kind of cosmic horror. Cosmic horror because I find myself further and further from understanding as I try to just cling to human empathy, which is also becoming harder and harder in some cases.
And AI? Ai ai ai. There's so much I want to do with AI, but after a day plying my trade at a company I'm actually feeling energized about, with a team I'm feeling energized about, I have my kids to juggle and catch up with, and my partner, and dinner, and everything after. When bedtimes are done, and there's stillness, it's like it clutches me like a body pillow.
The stillness creeps into my bones, and I just want to sit in it like a sauna, venting toxins from some part of my spirit. Toxins not from the job I enjoy, and the family I enjoy, but just some distillation of creativity left undrunk from lack of desire to bring cup to lips after everything else.
There's an ember I keep in the back room of the wellhouse of my soul. A flicker of flame on a small chunk of the dense carbon of ideas I stored there, and I am feeling like I've lived a life where my true choices have been few but calculated, intentional, and usually big. It's no use making small choices when you can avoid it. The universe brings things in reach, and I've grabbed them for nourishment, the opportunity for food, for friendship, for love.
The big choices, they've usually been borne of strong emotion and desire. I'm feeling that now, and I hate to choose now because it's feeling now like instead of making a choice and adding to one of my piles of ideas, one of my unfinished constructions I'm going to need to pick one to cut down completely to use as fuel for the others.
A diminishing of paths beyond this point. Each choice a winnowing of potential.
But I'm trying to be more excited and on board with becoming creative again, and trying to produce output, even though it may end up being on the back of some other project in pieces over top that ember in the wellhouse.
I need to encourage the flame to inferno because if I'm not, if I don't channel this stuff soon, I feel like the ember will give off it's last warmth and I'll be stuck in a state of only consumption with the balance of creativity somehow cut off from me.
Yes, all of this is melodramatic, but there you see is the problem. It's oozing out of me in any way it can even as the world is in turmoil and the fuzzy boundaries of over there vs over here get closer and closer.
This felt good to ramble out of the back of my mind. Not a sustainable solution, but a panacea for tonight at least.
Peace,
Shane
