There is a mood I often struggle with, a variant of the procrastination daemon.
A sluggardly daemon.
I’ve done the things I needed to do.
I can do the thing I want to do.
Gears clash and grind.
The sluggard pops out of its box and begins to chatter.
“You want to go there?”
“Isn’t here good enough?”
“If you go there it’ll take 10 minutes. Do you need to waste 10 minutes?”
“Couldn’t you just stay here?”
“Why do you need to go to a café to write?”
“You have instant coffee in your cupboard. Why did you buy it, if you’re just going to go out?”
“Oh, now you’ve dithered for 10 minutes! Well, you’ve wasted the time it would have taken to go to the café now, haven’t you?”
“Just give up, don’t go, you don’t need to.”
“Look, there’s probably something better you should be doing right here.”
“Maybe you should ask around if anyone else needs anything.”
“Are you sure you want to go there?”
“You’ve been trying to make up your mind for 20 minutes now. You should really just give up. Stay home. It’ll be fine. Just as good, really.”
“It’s a 10 minute journey. You’ll be bored.”
“Look, look, you can check Twitter a bit. See? It’s like being alive!”
“Maybe a bit of instagram?”
“Oh, goodness, look at the time. Half twelve now, oh my. By the time you get there it will be lunch time. Too late for a morning coffee!”
“You’ve just wasted the whole morning trying to decide if you really want to go for a coffee.”
“It’s obvious you don’t want it enough.”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t have listened to me give you reasons to stay home and do what you’re told for half an hour.”
“Maybe you should clean the bathroom. Put away the dishes.”
“That coffee’s overpriced. Stay home. Stay put.”
“Stay silent, stay safe.”
“Oh, come on now, what about your dog? Are you really putting your socks on?”
“Look at her! She’ll miss you!”
“If it had been just about the coffee, you could have been back by now. You’re just avoiding things you should be doing!”
“If you were a real writer, you could just sit down at your desk and write.”
“Oh, you forgot the shopping bag. Gotta go back upstairs and get it, don’t you?”
“That’s a Freudian slip. It means you don’t want to go.”
“Look, look, it’s nearly noon!”
“You’ve wasted the entire morning just because you’re lazy and couldn’t sit your ass down and work at your desk.”
“Do you think you’re special? That you need to go out to write?”
“You think it makes you more productive? You’re just pretending. Wasting time. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back. Twenty minutes a day not working.”
“That’s 100 minutes a week. 400 a month. That’s nearly seven hours you’re wasting going for coffee.”
“If you could just work, you wouldn’t need to waste time like this.”
“Are you really going to do this? Just sit in the car and drive?”
“Look at you, sitting there. You can’t write now, can you? No, because you’re in a car.”
“You could have taken a bicycle.”
“If you’d at least taken the bicycle, you could pretend it was exercise. This way you’re just burning fuel like a fool. Aren’t you ashamed? Destroying the environment just for fun? For your amusement?”
“For a coffee?”
I turn up the volume and the loud music drowns out the sluggardly daemon.
Spring
The darling plums are blossomed, the tenuous cherries budded. The forsythia is on fire, the willows crawl with their caterpillar petals.
My jacket is too hot.
I sweat, at last.
I turn up the volume and the loud music drowns out the sluggardly daemon.
Synthetic Coffee
It tastes like filter and singed O-ring.
I turn up the volume and the loud music drowns out the sluggardly daemon.
War Machine
It’s darkly humorous to see how much worse the Russian army is than we all thought. In every dimension: what they do and how they do it.
I turn up the volume and the loud music drowns out the sluggardly daemon.
Rain
It will end the drought and bring the fog and melt the sky and sing the song of the …
I turn up the volume and the loud music drowns out the sluggardly daemon.
Life
There’s nothing like trying to have a child when you’re 40 to remind you that you are a biological subject of physical forces beyond your control.
People defy their biology and fail.
Sisyphus wins.
Imagine Sisyphus Happy
He has mastered the art of rolling one boulder up a hill. With infinity, I could master drawing a circle.
Raindrop
… It hits the window and explodes. It’s unity destroyed, it leaves a vertical spatter of child droplets. Three, five, seven.
More follow.
The glass remains.
The droplets will leave shadow stains as they evaporate.
Writing Therapy
The words I write about the sluggardly daemon sparkle in a circle about me. Each glyph banishes the daemon a little further away. Frees me a little more.
The words will leave memory stains as they fade.
Then the daemon will return from its guilty hole.
Shit Shrike
Imagine a bird engineered to pick up bags of dog poop and impile them on a compost tree. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Shills and Contrarians
Nothing like a war to show which contrarians are just shit shrike shills. So many people asking sharply pointed questions to distract themselves and others from the massive threatening beast taking a shit right in front of us.
Hang In There
It’s alright.
You’re allowed to enjoy a coffee.
A ray of sunshine.
A flower on the bough.
It’s alright.
Here. Have a story I wrot [sic].