Coffee Shop Blues
I’ve taken to visiting the Starbucks just down the road from my house to indulge in the most basic of delights: coffee/tea, a good playlist, and the made-up idea that I am a main character in an ever-fluctuating genre of some movie or limited series.
Jokes aside, I’ve been having trouble sticking to things. I feel like this is a usual lull in between projects: I finish a manuscript, I’m full of the high of completion and the exhaustion of getting through it, and then…it just stops. I can’t really bring myself to get into anything else, so I take a break. Then that break results in me picking up one ((or two) (or three)) hobbies, which inevitably means I get excited and think I can take on some really big project, and then I’m knee-deep by the time the writing bug hits again.
Right now, I’m knee deep in crocheted hamburgers and attempts to draft out a webcomic chapter.
The point is, I want to do everything. Everything.
I want to draw. I want to write. I want to paint. I want to make music. I want to thread beads onto keychains and bracelets. I want to collect flip phones. I want to collect mechanical keyboards. I want to make a battle vest. I want to go thrifting. I want to get rid of everything I own, and I want to hold it tight like a drowning man at sea.
I want too much.
Well, whatever. I seek to uncomplicate my life, myself, my future: I will cut myself off from other things, dedicate everything to that one idea that rings true like the bells I keep on my door to ward off bad luck. I have my routine; my workout, my attempts at a diet, my forays to Starbucks. These things will not change. They keep me grounded just enough in routine that I don’t fly off the tracks.
But I’m going to focus. I have to. Because I’ve ended up becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none, which is neither here nor there, but it does mean that I haven’t clawed and fought for something in a while. And I think I need to do that. I need to create something I’m so obsessed with that I can’t conceive of leaving it to sit on my computer, languishing, collecting the electronic dust of endless bytes of data that will one day be lost even to the wayback machine.
What’s next?
I think I’m going to do something for myself. Something for a part of me, like all my characters and stories are, but maybe more true than any of them have been before. Maybe more indulgent. Maybe something of what I wish I had, what I try desperately to dream about at night when all I can think of is how my brain is vibrating and one day I’ll die and leave everything behind even when I want nothing more than to go on forever.
(I guess that’s for another day, that death may be a sister but I think I am her also, and maybe I live this life only to cross that threshold and remember my power, my eternity.)
Well. I think I’m going to Starbucks this weekend, 100+ degree (f) weather or not.
After all, if I don’t make these stories solid and insist that they take shape in this world, who will? Certainly not any of the cis white writers in the market. And anyways, I always did have too much anger and spite in me. It’s about time that went to good use.
