Discipline

Kids, take your seats.

Tommy, stop pulling Jasmine’s hair.

Johnathan… Is that a water gun filled with jasmine-scented cleaner?

Okay. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll try to teach amid the chaos.

It’s not like they are paying me enough either way.

Discipline.

The word makes you shiver, doesn’t it?

The fact is, if I guilt trip myself into doing something, I am more likely to do it. When it comes to writing: the more I write, the better I feel about my writing. The words that took longer to come out—be it in a story context, or any context—don’t hit as many walls as they once did. The only thing I can blame it on is consistency. Writing when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to. As well as pride in my work. Even if the pride goes only as far as saying to myself, “Hey, it isn’t good in the slightest, but there it is. Now edit it before someone sees it.”

I’ve tried to blog and have failed many times. These blogs were usually centered on an idea. There was a music blog. Another where I paired coffee with music, which lasted two posts (I ran out of steam with this silly idea pretty quickly). I held a short story and poetry blog on Tumblr for many years and had gathered a consistent following. But even so, I pulled all my work from it and kept it to myself for a while. I’ve realized that sharing your writing over blogs just doesn’t always work. And if I were to keep up a blog I would just have to write about whatever I felt like writing. Hence this post about what it takes me to write a post.

I talk about routine a lot (see my January 13th post, aptly called “Routine). It’s not that I have to follow a set of guidelines for my day. But it helps. Especially when it comes to something like writing. Especially when you aren’t getting paid, keeping to some kind of schedule can be the thing that you need. I tell myself to write by Saturday, edit by Sunday, and post by Monday. Alas, this never seems to go as planned. But it is a loose window that I can work with and, so far, it has been fairly productive.

As a fiction writer, I will get into my head a lot, trying to shake through the cobwebs to get from one point to another without confusing myself or my future reader. This type of work can become exhausting. Take many of my posts: walking, believing, learning new things. These are necessities when it comes to getting out of my own head and remembering the world around me. If I forget that there are people, animals, buildings, stars, and mountains out there, then my prose will fall flat. That much is obvious. But that aside, sometimes I want to just write about real life, without all of the fluff.

An open dream of mine is to be a journalist. I think a lot about following a subject around the world and documenting what I see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. There is so much discipline in that field. I long for it sometimes, especially when I am building palaces in my mind, trying to make them sound interesting on paper. There is discipline in that too, of course. Roping in your creativity enough until it makes sense to someone who doesn’t share your mind. To you journalists out there, I envy you. I know that is a tough, and often dangerous, job. It is also very important work.

“So what are you really trying to say?” Johnny is asking me, smelling completely like cleaner. Listen, I am not entirely sure, you little shit. Maybe I am just reiterating things to myself so I stay disciplined in this crazy, non-linear type of work they call Writing. It may all seem obvious, especially to those who are published writers already, but sometimes discipline itself is hearing the same things over and over again. It’s like your ABCs. Or something.

Rediscovery

Recently I have made a Big Change. 

A part of me wants to admit that it was a Difficult Thing to do. That is the type of thing that get people’s attention. But it wasn’t. It took a long time to finally make said Big Change, yes, but it was one of the easiest things I’ve done. A Very Specific Thing had taken up so much of my mind space that it should’ve paid my therapy bills. I needed to remove that Very Specific Thing from my life altogether. Now that it is gone I have already begun to feel the side effects of instant freedom.

My last post documented my new foray into the kitchen-sphere. That has become such an important part of my life, in a way that I could’ve never expected. It is my meditation: cutting up vegetables into tiny bits, lazily measuring spoonfuls into a pot, breathing in the very specific scent of heated parsley. When I found a way to cut an onion more efficiently I wanted to tell the world. “How have I never cut an onion properly!” I wanted to yell. When you feel more free in your life, you find more reasons to happily yell.

Recently I have tuned up my bike, something that has sadly leaned on my garage wall for many a year until now. I take it to the bike trail with an audiobook in my ears, pedaling straight and letting the wind blow through my helmet. Screaming about onions, reveling in the simple act of moving both feet in steady circles. Take that, Very Specific Thing. Look out how smooth I ride now that I cut onions like the greatest of them.

Wholesome. It has been a word that has become part of my girlfriend and I’s vernacular these days. It means comfort, finding your center, what makes you feel relaxed. Cooking a meal and cueing up the Jenna and Julien podcast or watching Julien cook on his own channel is a treat. Their laughter helps. Their curiosity for the world. How happy they are with themselves. And the constant interruptions from their numerous dogs, tongues a-wagging.

That is what rediscovery means to me. If you were asked who you were, what you like to do, and what makes you happy, how would you respond? A home cooked meal. A well-tuned bike. Watching silly and wholesome videos with your significant other. It is all about getting back to the basics with yourself.

It’s a wonder that ridding one’s self of whatever Very Specific Thing can uncover the things that have been there all along. Waiting. When you lift a burdensome rock you begin to notice what has been suffocating underneath. Especially this day and age when everything moves so fast. When there is so much to fear. It becomes overwhelmingly pertinent to find the things that give you calm. Be it food, a positive partner, a bike ride, a podcast, finding something wholesome to replace the things that cause you anxiety is the self-care you need. Photoshopping a dinosaur playing basketball while the world is ending? It fits in there somewhere.

Produce Minotaur

I walk through a labyrinth of multicolored orbs in search for—what? Purpose, perhaps. I pick up one with the smoothest flesh, my own face reflected. Whose hands have plucked this reddened beauty from the earth? From it I look at others and think of -cides: pesticides, fungicides, herbicides… My heart is beating too fast for this chore. As I follow other walls of this maze I wonder. I wonder aloud under my breath. I speak to the boxes and cans and frozen bags that I have lived my life living in, actually living in? Maybe. Just maybe. What it takes to preserve you, I speak to the meats that I have recently shunned. What does it take to keep these foodstuffs alive, to keep myself alive?

Organic and free range and -cide free and free trade and we can get lost in an echo chamber of our own fears-turned-flesh. It isn’t exactly for this reason that I made the totally “crazy” decision to cook for myself in earnest, but control over the elements does have a say. Grocery stores have always been my minotaur in the maze. Why? When it comes to cooking, I don’t have the mental dexterity of others. The creativeness when it comes to vegetables and turning them into more than raw side items. I found myself filling a basket of cereal, bread, peanut butter, jelly, Progresso soup cans. After work it would be all I wanted, something quickly made or hastily microwaved. It isn’t out of laziness dear reader, even though I would be quick to call myself so. It’s pure lack of knowledge when it comes to the kitchen. 

I am in the labyrinth again when I see it. Snarling, a maw of rage and smelling of rotted meat. It is blocking an assorted section of fungi: button, shiitake, portobello. Doesn’t it know that I have never cared for them? A hoof as large as my head protects bell peppers like a goalie, a hairy knee hiding an eggplant. But it makes me want them all the more. To defeat this ugly beast I picture it as a tiny bobblehead on the dash of my hatchback. I can promise you, the minotaur doesn’t like that one bit as it begins to growl. As it bursts into blue-black smoke.

It may be that cooking has always seemed like a pastime meant for dinner parties, not for a solitary man bent on getting sustenance quickly and efficiently. Even though I am not opposed to leftovers in the slightest, I think of how long it takes to make certain dishes and I cringe. If there is only an hour until bedtime, why would I go through the trouble? But once again—that lack of dexterity, of creativity. So, I throw out the meat. I throw bell peppers, eggplant, garlic, and shiitake mushrooms into a pan and stir fry them. I throw these simply over rice steamed in vegetable stock. Shrimp with butter and cajun spices. This is not rocket science, I tell the recent victor over the produce-guarding minotaur. And I kick myself for ever thinking otherwise.

What I also get now is a new high, like a runner at full tilt. And to my science-loving mind, there is something about measuring, even if you let instinct control your heavy hand when it comes to the salt. What also helps is finding someone you love who also loves the kitchen, who you can dance with when granules of sugar and salt and baking soda and spindles of zucchini litter the floor. You think to clean it up before the cats get to it but the smell is intoxicating and maybe there was something in those shiitake mushrooms… You’ll keep dancing. Because you’ve been stealing bits of eggplant while they have been sizzling and you are feeling something special.