I’m going to take a ramble into the crevices of my mind to see what comes out of me. Here I go:
I’m sitting in a coffeehouse, located across the street from the San Francisco Zoo and three blocks from the blue Pacific. It’s almost 6 p.m., which means I’ll arrive home later than I want to, but I swore I wouldn’t let my pen stop until I finished writing at least two pages.
I just got over a very bad cold. I was sick for a whole week. It just hung on and on and wouldn’t go away. Today’s my first day out of the house.
When we’re sick, all we wish for is to gain our health and strength back. But as soon as we get better we forget how lucky and blessed we are to have our health and strength.
Writing as fast as I can in my journal is so important to me. It tells me what’s going on in my mind and many times, as a bonus, it generates a story or essay idea. That’s why I love speedwriting.
I read an interesting article today in the San Francisco Chronicle by sports columnist Scott Ostler. Ostler actually admitted, like I do every so often in these weekly pieces, that his well for column ideas was as “dry as a good martini.” To overcome his dry, empty well, he wrote whatever came to mind today, whether it was connected to sports or not. In other words, he was releasing his subconscious, which was a pleasure for me to read since I espouse such a philosophy.
There’s a hell of a lot of noise going on in here. A few people are talking on their cell phones, not in low, muffled tones, but in very high voices, as people tend to do on cell phones.
I have a cup of coffee in my left hand and my unstoppable pen in my right. All of a sudden I can’t wait to finish this piece because of the loud chatter going on around me. Noise is a great distraction to this writer. But I’m not going to let it deter me from finishing two pages.
I’m reminded of Larry David in one of his Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes. He was sitting alone in a restaurant while a man at the next table, also alone, was talking loudly on his cell phone, just like the three people around me are doing. What did Larry do? He struck up a conversation with an invisible person across the table from him, talking as loud as the guy next to him. So the guy on his cell stops talking and complains to Larry that he can’t hear the person he’s talking to. The nerve of the guy! That’s what I feel like doing now, talking in a loud voice to an invisible person across the table from me—except I’m not a comedian with a TV series.
You, out there, why don’t you try writing as fast as you can? It might do you some good to find out what’s stored in the crevices of your mind.