PROCESSing

This time tomorrow I'll be in the desert.

Crazy part is, it'll actually be a real desert. It'll be the kind with dunes and dust and rolling shadows that trick your eyes. It won't be the desert of the soul, the parched graveyard of the mind, or the dark night of the spirit. Nah, it won't be any more of that existential shit. It'll be the kind of dry I can hold in my hands. If I can stumble through one more urban day, one more day skating on this glass and iron grid, I'll get on a plane and wake up in Vegas. And then I'm going to drive.


The idea is to pitch my tent in Death Valley, pour a bourbon, make a fire and think about this:

PRODUCT VERSUS PROCESS
or....

prOcess versus PRoducT
or...

OCESSP sveRUS prOCTDu

I finish my semester this evening. I want some kind of internal brass bell to ring. A button. A gong. I want Anthony Michael Hall to punch me in the shoulder. But what I've got instead is, well, creative process, which looks a lot more like a bunch of work halfway through its life cycle, some inspired, some shit and all of it only breathing if I fill it full of my helium. Somehow this feels anticlimactic.

Last semester, after reading the equivalent of the Library of Congress' bibliography section on international politics and the Middle East and acing a final and three major papers, my husband and I went out and drank a paycheck's worth of wine. The first toast was along the lines of, "here's to doing something tangible and easy to toast to!" This semester's toast will be something like, "here's to coming up with some solid concepts and then getting a little off track after workshopping them, but finally accepting that taking a bit of breathing space will inevitably restore buoyancy to your craft!" Salut!

This was a process semester. Scratch that, a process year. I'm seeing this whole school-slow-as-molasses thing as an exercise in forced process. It's like that scene from A Clockwork Orange where the guy's eyelids are forced open with those little metal prods so that he can bear witness to the atrocities of the world before him. I will be forced to surrender my need for a moment of conclusion. My consciousness will be scrubbed of words and phrases containing the likes of "content", "pages", "bang it out" and "nail it".

I will get comfortable with the following idea:

I AM NEVER FINISHED.

And if I can't get comfortable with it yet, I'll just get drunk and go hiking.