Creativity may flow from an endless tank, once it’s activated. But, if you have access to multiple tanks, they can only be turned on one at a time.
The creative faucet I’ve been wielding recently has nothing to do with writing fiction. Which I lament. No, not just lament, I bemoan the fact that my energies are being spent toward a creation I despise: software that will be used to promote the further promulgation of the evil duo consumerism & capitalism. Yuck. And it’s not just the building of solutions, it’s the monitoring, worrying, fiddling, responding to “incidents”, and the exhaustive fixing of code that worked—and then just didn’t anymore.
It could be due to the fact that during this joyous season of giving, this data-broker middleman company is positioned exactly where the most “giving” flows. Literally millions of orders a day grinding through this system. What worked for five-hundred thousand cannot deal with two-million. And so the hours of hand-wringing, the feverish typing-testing-deploying of code. Oy! The humanity.
And throughout it all, the sad fact that I’d rather be writing fiction. But can’t. Because I can only turn on one creative spigot at a time. I’ve tried to run two. Can’t. The code flows—or the story does. But never the twain. Dream-time brings visions of syntax checks and semaphores dancing in my head. Of event-streams and data-queues, stacked and awaiting their processing turns.
Maybe when I was thirty I could have maneuvered and managed both. But here at sixty, what a sad number is sixty, I can only handle the one.
Happy Saturnalia, all.
-Mole
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Yeah, yuck!
Now, Mr. Anonymole, I’d like you to give us a demonstration of a barbaric ‘yawp.’
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I never thought of it that way. For me, when I’m creative at work there is a chance that I will exhaust myself, therefore clogging any other tank. It’s not that the stream cannot flow, there just isn’t any pressure to bring it to the surface.
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Maybe that’s it. A single tank of creativity, but multiple, exclusive outlets.
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Dear Mole…you’re not alone.
I don’t know whether the left brain/right brain thing really exists [in terms of creativity], but /something/ splits my brain up too. I can do technical writing OR fiction OR graphics, but like you, only one at a time. The only consolation I can offer is that fallow fields really are more productive once they’re planted again, perhaps because your subconscious is hard at work on the ideas your conscious brain is not currently allowed to play with.
Hang in there and have as relaxed a Christmas as possible. 🙂
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Crossin’ my fingers.
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Truuuuuust me, I’m a writer. 😀 😀
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Ugh I definitely feel you…… This month is awful, I am totally sapped, I have nothing to give. The consumerism depresses me a lot this time of year and my job drains me. By the time I get home, I’m too mad and tired to do anything for myself but vegetate.
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That’s it exactly. Calgone take me away.
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You know, I’ve often noticed that when things are hectic at work, I have a hard time doing anything creative, including blog posts on anything other than entertainment. And I don’t even have the excuse anymore that I’m doing coding, but I still spend a lot of time finding technological and management solutions. I always wondered if I was just lazy. But your travails resonate with me. Sucks that we have to make a living.
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My muse wears few hats, that is, when she even hangs around at all. The solutions architect hat used to be one I could don and doff at will, replacing it with the Tales From the Edge chapeau, or a weathered Stetson when the mood took me. These days she prefers a wet paper bag.
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Hi A. Mole,
There comes a time in everyone’s life. Maybe this is your time. It is like the Rubicon, or the final inch, as the Russians say. We confront something that we know is catastrophic or life-changing and then either quickly or slowly we accept the outcome. I think you are into outcomes, at least the probability of the outcomes. For me, this is similar to any of the great upheavals in history. The revolutions, the wars, the old pandemics, the collapse of Earth’s environment (plenty in the past) etc. and so here we sit, tied to the internet and the business that roars across it like a hurricane. I think it is undeniable that things are breaking down and the old ways are becoming untenable. The capitalist system as we know it is over. All of those “economic laws” are being replaced by what looks to me like a poor, inoperable world. It is no wonder to me that you are in the dumps. Let us both reside there. Let the others have hope. Hope these days seems like denial, religious cant or, worse, complicity in lies that pass for hope. You understand the world from a certain vantage point that I don’t share, but I trust you. You are in the weeds, I was looking out over the mountain top. Both views are depressing and regardless of the size of the element, the end results are the same. And, of course, all of this effects our minds, our will to action. I’m moving around, doing stuff, yet I am paralyzed. I think it is the only thing I can do at this moment. I’m waiting around to die in what I call heaven: Mexico. I’m challenging Towns Van Zandt on this one. Love. Duke
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Your reply, like a cleaver, cut to the heart of the situation. I may and well be at a crossroads. Coincidentally, or not, this last gig portends riches, but riches cursed. “One last job, and you can ease into obscurity.” Do I stick with it and reap the possible rewards? All the time, imprisoned and bitter. Or forgo the payout, relinquish the gilded carrot in exchange for a meager, perhaps happier, but more strife ridden future? Were I alone in this, I’d have abandoned all of this bullshit-work long ago.
On hope, I’ve long planned an essay on false hope: good or bad? Reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager, I am lured to either side, yet tend to slide into the erudite gully populated by curmudgeons like us. If Homo Sapiens Sapiens have held such mental acuity for these hundreds of thousands of years, did early Man also suffer such awareness of the purposelessness of existence?
i know how to fix Capitalism. It’s a social construct after all. It could be reimagined with rational constraints imposed by We The People. Will it? No. By the time such a system might be enacted, the powers of production will have been fully automated. From there, we all know the outcome.
Shelly:
–I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Others contemplating similar, the more hopeful thoughts:
https://www.vox.com/2021/12/16/22837830/covid-pandemic-climate-change-great-resignation-2021
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I should introduce you to CodeSlingers, the Musical …. written while I worked for a company that sold software to the large pharmas. A grim time indeed.
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CorpPharma — not many sectors more evil than that one. Designer drugs for designer illnesses. Pfizer & Moderna are raking in tens of $Bs on Covid.
Years ago I equated programming to the new salt mines: pure drudgery.
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But what a Christmas we would suffer, commercially, if you weren’t on that wall! Heroes, like you, on the front lines of capitalism deserve our most glowing praise, and I’m here to give it. On Any, On Moley, On Money, On Greed! Light the way, Rudy Red, Rudy Green, and keep those rivers flowing through these cold wintry days!
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Love it, Tom!
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Think of it as saving what’s in the creative tank for later–all that pent up creative energy just waiting to explode out onto the page!
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A sorry tale, Mole. At least your job must give you some satisfaction from being creative in that way?
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There are moments, Barry. Problem solving does provide some reward. Architecting a complex system and seeing it finally work would feel better if said system weren’t for such an inane endeavor.
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I guess you’re looking forward to the moment when you can retire and do what the hell you like…
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I’d count the days, but the x on the calendar slips ever into the future.
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I don’t know what to say about this. I need to go back to sleep. It is 6:00 a.m. in Mexico. Cold. Dogs breathing heavily. Perhaps later I can respond in a way that can satisfy both of us. Everything seems so broken these days. Oh well, beware the Jabberwok my son … Duke
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Sorry Mole, we all gotta follow the money flow…
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