June 8, 2006

Romantic

I sit in a café near my house and I write The Grouch Potato. It takes me an hour-and-a-half to write and edit while I sip my peppermint tea and eat a croissant. My constant companion is my Dell D800 laptop.

Some people dream of writing; of sitting on a hilltop writing; of sitting in Paris writing. This is romantic for sure, but it's not the sitting in the place that's the fun part; it's the writing. I sat in a café, wrote, and edited an eleven-hundred word article. I did that because I'm a writer and I needed somewhere to sit down.

It's easy to get lost in romantic dreams and then to not experience what is dreamt of. But when I live my life fully, it becomes romantic; uniquely romantic. When I try to make it romantic, I'm not living. I could dream all my life of romance, but what's the point?

The essence of tantra is to believe and to behave as if you already are what you wish to be. I wish to be enlightened, so I just practice being enlightened. One day, I'll realize that I am already enlightened. It's the same with writing: I'd like to be professional writer amongst many other things; so I just write and publish; people read and enjoy. And here I am: I am a writer.

I was talking with a small group of friends the other night and one of them mentioned what our professions are: photographer, interior designer, and writer. I was looking around wondering who the writer was. Oh, that's me; that's very cool.

Why would I choose to be anything less than unique and exceptional? There's too much insanity in this world masquerading as sanity. I'd like to be everything that I want to be; my experience has shown me that any message saying that this is not possible, is a lie.

People ask me how I write. I open a word file on my laptop and I start typing. I type a load of words and then I read them; I read them many times. I edit them, and edit them some more. I love doing this. I'm editing right now, hello.

I write from start to finish in one flow and then I edit. I don't assemble as I write; it just flows out of me. Sometimes I do go back and add things, but that's very rare.

I have so many topics which I'd like to write about. I have a file with about one-hundred-and-sixty topics in it right now. I always carry a few three-by-five-inch index cards in my back pocket. When an idea comes I write it on an index card and drop it into my inbox. When I go through my inbox I add it to the file. I review the file before writing and then review it thoroughly once a week.

Here's the paradox: the most important part of being a writer is not the writing; it's living a full and balanced life; it's learning to paraglide and play the piano; it's reading my poetry in front of an audience and learning to sing; it's about doing things that are scary and challenging; it's all about having a lot of friends and talking about everything under the sun; it's laughing and loving; it's thinking about a girl and wondering if she's a rose and if I'm the sun, or if it's the other way around.

Writing is about getting up at five in the morning and running up a steep hill; it's sitting on my bed before going to sleep and watching the breath in my nose; it's hiking for five hours and then getting a taxi home; it's long slow breaths that fill me with joy.

Writing is done while driving to get a massage, on my steering-wheel, with a space pen. Writing is going to an adult-child group and crying; it's about reliving trauma; it's about annealing my amygdala; it's loving people; it's getting irritated by everyone else and then realizing that I'm really irritated by myself.

Writing is living at a hundred miles an hour; it's superoptic; it's supersexy; it's pottering around aimlessly; it's seeing the poetry in my life. English is my love and language is my life. There's something so much more than the content; there's a message in this beauty.

Most of all, writing is clicking send and moving on to the next topic.