All Dried Up and Nowhere to Go

i.

Seriously though. This week after working 50 hours for two weeks straight I feel like all the creative juice that was previously flowing through my veins has dried up and backed up into the pathways of my brain leaving me well….creatively constipated.

Except that what is stuck there is not shit. And eating prunes is not going to solve this problem. So how, my question is how to reconnect with the flow? Or more importantly, how to always be in the flow even if your life is threatening to dry you up?

Seriously though. I haven’t touched my guitar in 2 weeks and all I feel about it is guilt and pressure. Now “the foundation” is having concerns about “my ability to complete my project.” AKA “The clock is now ticking on yo’ money so you better make something happen with yo’ record plans and soon!” Well, you know what? I’m having doubts too. I’m tired. I’m spent and I’m running a marathon that just keeps getting longer. Can you imagine being 5 feet away from the finish line of a crucial race and then watching the line be pushed out another 26 miles? Can you imagine that this has been going on for 3 years? You’d be pretty damn tired too.

I mean if an artist can honestly and completely be dedicated to her art year after year until she comes to a point where everything is at an impossible crossroads suspended between passion, debt, responsibility, talent, Saturn, insanity and dreams… If she is standing on her own in this, and always has been, like some lone guitar ranger singing her heart out with a vengeance with nothing beneath her but the sky and no map before her but her own hands… If she should come to a time in her life when she can’t decide what matters and all she can manage to do is eat, sleep, work, pay the bills, and try not to be afraid of what she is becoming…If she can see the new lines in her face… If she knows in her heart that her talent is a precious thing and is now seeing herself as a struggling and ill-equipped custodian of such talent… What, pray tell, is such an artist to do?

I need a revolution! Where is my knight in fucking shining armor? Where is someone who can save me?

Oh yes. I have decided to save my life. But I was hoping that life would wait for saving.

ii.

The other day after working for 10 hours with my nose pressed up against a computer screen, my shoulders hunched up against my ears and my wrists clicking in time with each strike of the keyboard…

After riding home in a sticky BART train for an hour, where some guy with a grocery bag full of oblong vegetables actually poked me in the bum with his assorted cucumbers, or whatever, and didn’t even notice…

After all of this… I came home feeling completely mechanical. I plopped down on the couch where I stopped long enough to realize that I was holding my breath and probably had been for most of the day. I looked outside at the garden growing darker by the minute as the last ray of sun hopped over the fence and into the neighbor’s back yard. And I thought, “I think I might actually already be dead, because this can’t really be living.”

What the hell kind of a thought is that?!

And do you know what I’m doing now? Now I am sitting in my car, watching people. Somehow I don’t feel so alone when I’m sitting in my car. I feel like I’m going somewhere or doing something or as if I have some direction. I watch the people park their cars and get out to walk their over-heated dogs. I watch the people kiss and hold hands on the sidewalk. I watch the people pack their bags of groceries in their trunks, and I wonder what they will make for dinner. This makes me feel better.

I’m feeling dry and dusty, and there is nowhere to go. So, I am sitting in my car and writing this to you.