Creativity is a fickle mistress, and right now my mistress is screwing someone else.

It’s not like this is some Seussian endeavour of creativity. It’s a blog. It’s not even a fiction-oriented blog. It’s non-fiction. Easy-peasy, really. It’s almost like a formula of sorts.

(My Day + Some Thoughts) ÷ Logic x Reason = Nifty Blog

But aside from the fact that mathematics sucks ass and I failed in my quest for the Ultimate Geekette Award, creativity and inspiration have just not been striking many of my chords of late.

I did, however, minor in Geekology back in school, so I’ll have you know that I’ve been attacking this lack of creativity with a logic as fierce as a cat on a fat mouse. I keep tripping over myself and blaming myself six ways to Sunday for all different reasons about why I feel like some impotent version of myself, but it’s really not that complicated.

There’s the new job thing, for starters. Complex learning curve, but the plus side of that coin is that I’m clearly a driven, hard-working person with extremely high efficiency and a great way with the people, so the Powers That Be have deemed it time to make my lowly part-time office assistant into a full-time one. (I’m the office manager. Yes, I have peons. It was alluded today that I even have a whip to crack. C-r-a-c-k!)

Add to that the rather questionable decision weeks ago to do what might be the worst thing I can do for my creativity but the best thing I can do for my health (quit smoking dope, which had been largely chronic for much of the last eight years), and, yeah, it’s proving to be a humdinger. I’m more foggy straight than I ever was stoned. Jesus, where’s my dealer’s number?

Then there’s the other thing. Money was a big stressor for the last several months. All of a sudden, just as of last Saturday, that’s beginning to ebb away. Jesus, where’s my dealer’s number?

So there’s hope. Really. There’s only one thing I do know. The creativity will surge again. I know it will. My ethic for writing and its importance to me ensures that.

This happens to us all — times fall upon us when we somehow find ourselves just a little less of who we are than we wish we were. It’s deceptive. The proverbial catch-22. When you know you’re not really being yourself, you often are closer to being who you are simply because you know you’re missing the mark.

Times like these are like falling down a big ol’ hill: just because you know how you got to where you are doesn’t mean you can make your way back. Sometimes you need a new way home, and most of the time you’re gonna see some good sights along the way. It’s not a bad thing, just different.

And it’s weird. I feel myself changing. I’m this malleable work in progress and some kind of shape is finally emerging, but I’m so close to it that it’s almost too hard to see. I need to get a little distance, but being so caught up in the frenzy, distance is something I won’t have until I have it. Like driving, the objects whizzing by us suddenly relocate and end up in our rearview mirrors. Perspective’s a funny thing that way.

Y’know, a part of me craves contributing to this blog and another part loathes it — mostly because the act of writing forces me to look inward, and being the logician I tend to be, I’m just constantly at a loss right now as to where my journey’s headed. I suspect, though, that buying a postcard’s in the plans because I think this is one trip I really, really want to remember.

What I’m trying to say is, bear with me. I’m caught in an intergalactic swirlie, and it’s hard to stop the flush. When I come out the other side, though, I know I’m going to marvel over just how far I’ve come. Trouble is, I don’t know how far I’m going, so “the other side” sounds like a fabled Tolkien landscape kids tell each other of in hushed voices as they gesture to a horizon the eye can’t even see.

Some days, though, I can close my eyes and almost touch it. I’m hoping I’ll soon open them and find it all around me. In the meantime, I’m just trying to enjoy the ride, bumpy though it may be.

(If you’re like me, pictureless posts look boring. So, I thought I’d post one of my own for the hell of it. This was taken at the beginning of the month, along the river, not too far from my home. A hundred years or so ago, there were a lot of shipyards and fisheries and such along the banks. Now most of those are gone in these parts, and the occasional bit like that still stands as a throwback to an age gone by. It somehow seemed fitting for this topic.)