I have been feeling slightly blocked for a while- though perhaps it might be more accurate to say that I am slightly blocked most of the time and that I have occasional moments of clarity. I haven’t been doing these vomits regularly in a while. Won’t try to explain it, just poor flow/energy management.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t done that in a really long time. The last books I remember devouring like that were the Harry Potter series. Since then maybe the Lord of the Rings, Carl Sagan’s biography, Soul Made Flesh, The Black Swan and Antifragile, Malcolm Gladwell’s books (particularly Outliers), The User Illusion, Lost Illusions… okay, a few books. But the point is that I read vociferously as a child- obsessively, like an alcoholic. I’d wake up and read until my mom demanded I shower, and I’d read in bed until my sister demanded I turn off the light. (When you grow older, she told me, you’ll wish you had time to sleep.)
I’m probably romanticizing this. I remember reading a Roald Dahl book while sprawled out on my sofa. I remember reading Enid Blyton books my mom got me, in my parents room. I remember reading a thick The Dark Is Rising tome at some boring wedding. Read a large chunk of the Mahabaratha at some temple event. Finished a buddy’s copy of Norwegian Wood over stolen breaks while at Pulau Tekong. Remember borrowing books about volcanoes and hurricanes and tornados, and pyramids and mummies and dinosaurs.
The library was a wonderland before the internet. I borrowed books about chess and video games. I had books on HTML, Java, C++… though I never properly learnt anything other than the first. I remember reading The Golden Compass… I think during primary school. The Pearl for a secondary school assignment. Charlotte’s Web, Friedrich, a Wrinkle in Time. Flowers for Algernon. I remember a book called When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Another rather weird one called Finn Family Moomintroll. I remember reading about knights. I remember a collection of Aesop’s fables and I remember reading an older version of Aladdin over and over again. There was something about trees with jewels in it. I remember reading about cars and trains and engines and planes, asteroids, meteors, cells, bones, carnivorous plants.
Writing’s important too. I had to take a break from Poached magazine for a while because I honestly felt like I had nothing useful to say. I didn’t know what I wanted people to think or talk about. Writing is a form of inquiry- what do you do when your inquiring leads you to the realization that you ought to shut up for a while? Well, that’s what I did. I think there is great value in decoupling oneself from the hustle and bustle of immediate relations and familar habits. I think I need to travel. Whatever it takes to break out of established routines so you can make yourself uncomfortable. In a positive sense, where you’re forced to pay attention to your surroundings, to your self.
I think I’m becoming a better writer. I don’t think it’ll show in these vomits but I think I see it in my work. I was looking at a draft of a blogpost I had written in February and I was disgusted with how meandering and rambly it was. I was trying to impress by bringing in all these slightly-interesting tangential facts while neglecting the central hook. Story of my life, maybe. Fixation with icing, neglecting the actual cake. That’s how I survived for a long time so I have to rewire my brain at a very fundamental level. I thought I made progress and indeed I might have, but the challenge remains undiminished. I have to bash myself against this wall like I might in a video game. I have to believe.
I had a thought about smoking and smokers and general procrastination or impulsiveness… something in there is about a lack of faith in the self and a lack of faith in the future. At some level it might be “tomorrow me will take care of it”. But that doesn’t seem like a real conviction, a sincere belief. It’s just lip service. If you sit a procrastinator down and point out their past history of failure, and they’re intelligent (as many procrastinators disproportionately are, I’m sure), they’ll have to admit it: they can’t be trusted. Procrastination is not very different from substance abuse. I think so because of the parallels in my experiments with reducing smoking, Facebook and procrastination. I’m not sure what these precisely are, maybe I’m imagining it. But they all involve certain conceptions of the present and the future in a way that’s irrational from a global perspective, yet seems to make sense in a local, present perspective. There seems to be a “get this pleasure now while it’s guaranteed because you don’t know how fucked up the future might be”. The influence of the present on the future is vastly underestimated, even altogether ignored.
At work now. To be continued.
“get this pleasure now while it’s guaranteed because you don’t know how fucked up the future might be” This preference is not only displayed by smokers and procrastinators, but the whole world shows this preference as reflected in interest and time value of money. The whole TVM is based on the notion that “individuals prefer consumption now then in future” Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money