A Small But Vital Thing, Taken

When I’m writing, one of the most crucial components of that process is my downtime. And I’m talking down downtime, not just like, oh I’m gonna fuck off and do something else for a while — I mean the times where I have nothing really to do, nothing to think about, and that’s when the weird hermit crab that is my brain emerges from its shell and starts to wander around its skull-shaped terrarium, finally comfortable. I’m talking about when I’m in the shower. Or mowing the lawn. Or just taking a walk. I get to perform a relatively thoughtless action, which allows my actual thoughts to focus on whatever story I am writing during that period.

So, if I’m working on a novel, I go for a walk, and during that walk, my brain emerges, and uses its various claws and pseudopods and probing tendrils to turn my current story over and over and over again. It pokes, it prods, it pulls it apart and smashes it back together again. I think about characters. I imagine scenarios. I play endless what if what if what if games. I find plotholes and try to figure out how to spackle them shut. It’s very useful time.

It is, in fact, essential time.

And the current news era has stolen this from me.

The CURRENT NEWS is like toxic groundwater — it fills all the low places. The moment my brain stops moving for a second, in seeps all the septic shit going on here in the country and around the world. I’m usually good at turning this off, at building seawalls, or at the very least finding a way to absorb that stuff — and my feelings about it all — into the work.

But it ain’t working.

The seawalls have failed.

So, instead of getting to chew on my story problems, I’m instead huffing news fumes and gargling catastrophe juice.

Technically, this is a me problem — but I do think it’s designed somewhat from the top down. Meaning, it’s intentional. I think flood the zone with bullshit as a strategy isn’t purely just about juking the media or one’s political opposition — I think it’s a way to synaptically overwhelm the citizenry. I think this strategy is flawed for a number of reasons (“I want to eat the bee’s honey, therefore I will throw rocks at the hive” might work but, uhhh, there are better ways), but it does overwhelm. It’s where you get the narrative of, “Don’t fall for this distraction! Wait, this thing is distracting us from that other distraction! Everything is a distraction except for that one thing, which as it turns out, is also a distraction from a thing we haven’t even seen yet.” None of it is a distraction. It’s a full slate of horrors both malicious and stupid, all of them moving forward simultaneously. It is a multi-pronged attack on our attention spans, our informational fidelity, and our ability just to deal with it all. We can juggle up to three balls, and so they throw three balls, four chainsaws, an angry octopus, and a bitey mountain goat at us.

For me, just from a practical, creative perspective, this fucking sucks. It’s very hard to escape the gravity well of Endless Hypervigilance and just sit down for a while and try to imagine what the pretend people in my head are going to do about the pretend problems I’ve given them. (Storytellers are such dicks.) It’s a small problem in the grand scheme but large in the personal, creative sense — to have a mind allowed to be free of troubles is far too big an ask, but to have a mind free of relentless, endless, unmitigated troubles feels like it should be a fair request now and again.

I don’t know what to do about it, precisely. I’ve tried just tuning out the news — which, for the record, means tuning out social media almost in its entirety — and that does work, with the exception that living in the total dark brings with it its own sense of wariness. Reading the news feels like tracking the path of a tornado, whereas looking away feels like admitting, “There’s a tornado out there, but no idea where it is or when it’s gonna pick me up and take me to Oz.” Plus, I like social media. I like being connected to other writers and readers and all the stupid shitposting that goes on. And then there’s the problem that when you do go back to social media and to the news, it’s just drinking from a burst sewer pipe. At least looking at it now and again gives you the vague sense that you’re taking small doses of iocaine powder in order to become immune to it.

(Spoiler: you’re never immune. You’re just disassociating.)

For the record, I’m managing — the greatest success I have in fixing this problem is a kind of vigorous diligence to combat the hypervigilance. Meaning, I have to be actively aware of my brain’s downtime and work very hard to try to keep it offline, so to speak, in order to let it defrag the creative hard drive. Easier said than done, and somewhat betrays the point of simply having downtime at all — downtime being a thing that is supposed to be passively automatic, not me stalking the fence with a rifle looking for whatever beast lurks there in the dark to tear through the chain-link and use its many antlers to fuck up the peace garden I’ve grown.

So, I dunno. Again, I’m managing.

But I figured I’d ask —

Anyone else have this problem?

And how are you handling it, provided you’re able to at all?

(I note here in conclusion that there are wayyyyy worse things going on than what I describe in this post. This is a woe is me boo-hoo kind of post, when there are people who have lost a lot more — there are people who have lost people. People stolen. People taken. People thrown into vans or simply churned under the propaganda machine. But please forgive me the need to talk about this small and vital thing that’s been taken, thank you.)

Anyway, buy my books or I am vanquished. Bye!