waiting for the muse.

perhaps i'll start without her. waiting, everybody waits. we complain about waiting, say how much we hate it, stuff like that. it seems as though we're getting to the point where every new invention or technological innovation that comes next is devoted to diminishing or even abolishing time spent waiting. i suppose that's why people started inventing stuff to begin with. advances in technology, by their very nature, socialize us to hate waiting. part of that, i think comes because we're overprogrammed, we're a culture that values activity to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. that's to say that if we're not in the middle of doing something we don't perceive ourselves to be doing anything of value.

i don't mind waiting so much, having an active imagination helps. maybe i should qualify that, i don't mind waiting in the micro sense of the word. i get frustrated with lines sometimes and traffic is a nuisance, but other than that, it doesn't bug me a whole lot. some of the best advice i ever got was from when i worked maintenance. it came from a crochety old carpenter named billy who constantly told me "now don't be in no g*ddamn rush, boy." i'm pretty sure that he didn't intend for it to be the kind of advice that i'd carry through life, mostly i think he just didn't want us to finish a project so quickly that we'd have to start another one, so it's funny that i've held on to that.

waiting in the macro sense is more difficult in that i'm not sure what it is i'm waiting for, and that's where billy's advice gets the most mileage. if i was in a rush, i'd be rushing towards nowhere, that's where i'd be. it's a significant temptation, despite the laid-back state of my personality, i crave the security of certainty, even if it's false, even if it's an illusion. c.s. lewis talks about people headed in towards nothing or headed towards an illusion and how people so differently perceive progress in a situation like that, how people can get to believing that progress can only come through moving forward, even when rushing closer to something that might not even be there, or to a wholly unknown destination. in that context, the most progressive person is the one who turns around to backtrack first, which is counterintuitive to how we perceive progress. we think, pretty much unequivocally, that some motion is better than no motion, meantime, we become afraid of solitude and terrified of silence, unable to relate to ourselves, and as a result, each other.

tell the muse to let herself in, there's whiskey on the counter.

feeling: fresh
thinking of: val kilmer's doc holliday in "tombstone"
music: "me and paul" willie nelson