repeat one thousand times

I choose distraction in the form of cinema, the miracle of dee vee dee, an excessive three disk version of a movie I've seen a dozen times. It's an excellent movie. But I feel disatisfaction well up, somewhere in the midst of it. I am thinking about the next =project.= I want to write a script, a script for a wonderful transcendent cartoon. I want the man who made this movie to make the movie of my script. I fantasize pleasantly about this unlikely scenario. But there is a worm in the lotus. Unfinished business. A nagging necessity. I have not completed the Novel. Great scads are left unfinished, voluminous pages left unwritten, predestined by an obsessive-compulsive structure I defined a thousand years ago in another country, another world, another time, another life.

A spark flares. To work, by God, to Work. I turn the dee vee dee off.

We've been living in this house for a while, a couple of months, but my little area is not yet assembled. The computer, the original Squink Teevee, moniter all covered with scrawled marker drawings and glow-in-the-dark stars and planets and a little voudou skull a fine friend brought back from New Orleans, has lain silent, devoid of power, lo all these many weeks. A surprisingly small amount of work, fueled by good scotch, brings this situation into order. I am amazed by this machine, this tremendously obsolete personal computer that another friend gave me for free, due to its decrepit uselessness. A little juice from the wall (magic!) and there it all is, the hundreds of pages of text that have accreted since the point, years ago, that I chose to set myself to this arcane work.

I do not start with what you are reading now, nor the few pages that preceded it (in some sense, though it is purposely a circuitous process to follow any of it in order). I start by transcribing an odd essay on language I wrote some months ago for a performance party my wife and yet another friend of ours arranged. Start with the easy, I advise myself, and move to the hard. Transcription to the form (a thing I call, for my own reasons, Blanks) is a relatively automatic process. It reminds me uncomfortably of my job. Pushing buttons. Copy and paste. A little here, quoth the prophet Isaiah, a little there. But it is quickly done. A sense of accomplishment. But then it is time to the true work. Time to write.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.