Day 46. My life in the bush of ghosts (15/2/19)
A break from what I was doing. A short one as I've work to finish. Some of this won't make a huge amount of sense to anybody but me as I'm not giving out specifics but let's see if we can get some general points from it, shall we?
After all, that's what we're here for: general points.
(Soundtrack: Apple Music's 'Favourites' mix again. Changes every Tuesday. This week's starts with Arctic Monkeys' 'Love Is A Laserquest'. Underrated. I can see Wilco and Patti Smith coming up. I can see Arcade Fire and Father John Misty. I can see a Michael Head single that I made the actual music video for. As you do. There are moments in the last five years that I don't reflect on often enough. I've done things I'd have never believed last time I was doing this daily.)
I think I may have finished writing for the day. 4:30pm Friday seems a good time to have stopped writing. But the truth is, you never stop writing. It's the job that doesn't go away. The thoughts are always there.
It's the job I very specifically chose. This isn't a complaint, I knew exactly what I was getting into.
Today's been a long one though. The entire left side of my face is an area of pain. I'm not sure if it's the arthritis in my jaw that my dentist informed me last year was now there. While carrying out £250 worth of other work that he'd found while I was trying to figure out what the pain was. "Excellent" I thought "so this is for life now?"
Last night I was considering how I wasn't getting the pain in my jaw at the moment. This morning it was back again. Don't tempt fate with your thoughts.
There could be some eye strain as well, I suppose. Staring at a screen all day. Reading glasses upstairs in drawer, can't be bothered walking up.
There may be a touch of cold. The room's cold. Putting the heating up warms the room and creates imbalance in the rest of the house. Cardigan over T-shirt as fashion choice.
I'm working on the Liverbirds script again. Working on the notes that I've got from a conversation with a possibly interested party. I know what I need to do with each character, know what I need to do with some barriers, some conflict. And I'm chipping away.
I'm on the fourth pass through the entire script of this week and I'm finding things I feel like changing each time. And I'm now at the point that I'm getting blind to the script. I walked away for a bit, went and sat on the couch staring blankly at the TV. A film from the thirties. Something about a mountain. With an opera in it. Looked a bit odd, ended suddenly. I think somebody had possibly had an affair. Stiff upper lips all over the place.
"Yeah, every single character has more motivation than those buggers" I thought. Before thinking "they're all dead now though so nobody's asking the questions anymore."
All art has the possibility of being temporary. We have no idea what's going to be remembered, what's going to be forgotten.
I presume all writers have those two little blokes on their shoulders: one saying "you're a genius", the other saying "you're a knobhead".
The answer is somewhere in the middle. The answer is to not worry too much about them.
The answer is probably to just leave it all until Monday and admit you're getting no further this week.
Some days you won't get contemplation on improving life. Some days you won't get stories on how I met my wife that make people melt a little bit. Some days you'll get the off days, the toothache days, the days where you feel a bit old, a bit tired, where things ache.
Ignore those days. Those days are just filler. It's all the other days that matter.
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