exploding lightbulbs

Eventually you probably get over the hump and stop writing about thinking and stop writing about writing and just write. I'm troubled that the most appropriate lines that come to mind are from The Matrix when Morpheus instructs Neo how to fight -- Stop trying to hit me and hit me -- and Star Wars when Yoda instructs Luke -- Do or do not. There is no try -- but I guess movie references are the allusions of our generation and there is no need for embarrassment.

I had ideas today. I have been having ideas all week. Ideas are problematic. At least mine are because my ideas always seem fun and lovely and economically impractical. Not impractical. They don't cost much; they just don't make anything. I'm not bad with money; I'm just not good at making it.

Like on the bus downtown two days ago (was it?). I'm on the 134, that lovely (word of the hour) little express that skips over half the commute and transits along the lake. The lake is beautiful and I am looking right at it but I'm not: it's earlyish and my mind hasn't yet popped into second gear. I don't know what I am thinking about, but not about the lake. And I think about not thinking about the lake and think about how anybody looking at me would say I am looking at and thinking about the lake (these are how the conversations in my head usually unfold) and to these theoretical voyeurs I would cleverly reply: what you look at doesn't matter; but how you look at it...

or something like that. It felt like a deep philosophical thought at the time. I was proud of it. It gave me hope. But I didn't write it down, and minutes later when my mind had moved through about seventeen different topics I was saddened to learn I had forgotten that thought that had filled me with a certain amount of creative glee. The 134 was turning off of Lakeshore and onto Wacker and I tried to convince myself that it was enough that I had thought the thought at all: that simply thinking it was evidence that my mind still had "it" and that "it" would come again when I needed "it" to.

I don't remember when I remembered (if hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, what is the memory of remembering called?). It might have been the same day that I decided I wanted to open my own literary agency for midwestern playwrights (and dramaturgs; and directors). Another idea! That would have put it at about a week after the dramaturgy blog. Another idea! Oh, and I have plans for a new works program for New Leaf if I am asked to move into the position of literary manager...

The job hunt goes poorly because I am stubborn and full of ideas and the Medici are all dead and even when they weren't they lived in Italy...

I just laid on the couch for the last hour listening to This American Life. The one radio show that I don't mind when it plays a repeat. What a great idea...