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My brain has picked a bad time to cause trouble. Here I am, in the midst of trying to write something for a brand new publication, trying to make a good impression, and I think my creative faculties have gone union. Yeah, unionized as in "insert surly teamster stereotype here." It’s hard to tell exactly when this happened, or to what extent my brain has become a union shop, but the effects have become more and more apparent as I’ve tried to sit down and put words onto the screen in front of me.
Now, I should clarify what exactly my problem is – it’s not that I can’t write at all, it’s just that instead of everything clicking and humming as it should, the creative process suddenly feels… disjointed. It’s like the various parts I use to write – imagination, memory, vocabulary, humor (use of that one is debatable, I know), and etc. – simply aren’t working as well as they used to. Which leads me to the prime suspect in this whole affair – the guy who’s responsible for taking all those parts and making them work together: my Internal Editor.
I didn’t even realize I had an Internal Editor (or IE for short) until several years ago when one of my wittier friends pointed him out to me. I don’t even know what she noticed that made her point it out to me (maybe her IE wanted to get his number or something). She made some comment about my lack of communication skills that day and said my "Internal Editor and I weren’t getting along." I - long being a fan of thinking that my head was full of loose parts - immediately latched onto the idea and gave my IE his own little personality. This consequently caused a whole new set of problems, because my IE – my literary companion, my ally, the guy who best helps me make sense out of the words escaping my fingers and mouth – turned out to be a sadist.
Yeah, it all made sense. People talk about having a "filter," or some kind of mental thing that stops them from making inappropriate comments at bad times. In my case, that’s my IE’s job. I’m sure that little punk catches them, too, but occasionally he’ll be in one of those "hey, let’s see what the red-headed dork does with THIS one" moods, and lets it fly. He’ll go out of his way to cause me pain and misfortune, and let’s not even hit upon what he’s done to my amazing skills with women.
So I’m sure this is his latest plan to make me suffer for his amusement – form a union. I can almost see him kicked back in his little office in the higher reaches of my psyche, eating donuts, drinking coffee and watching cartoons. He’ll occasionally glance up at the clock, because it’s all about the clock when you’re in a union shop. He’s probably even gone to the trouble to have a little shirt made with "Dustin’s Brain – Local 77" silk-screened on the front, just because he enjoys hammering a punch line to death as much as I do. So let’s pretend that I’m sitting down to do a little writing:
Imagination: Hey, the boss is trying to write some stuff. Everyone’s down in the conference room, let’s go.
IE: Nope. On my break.
Imagination: Uh… you can do that?
IE: Hey man, read the shirt. I’m union now, and I’ve got a 20 minute break coming to me every two hours. It’s in the contract.
Imagination: But you’ve not done anything yet today! How can you be on a break?
IE: Hey, the dork got up at 8:30 today, and I’ve been running the clock since then. He’s dang lucky I was nice enough to drag those visions of Paige Davis out of his subconscious for him last night when he was dreaming. I was off the clock then, you know.
Imagination: Yeah… I don’t really think you can do this.
IE: Sure I can! Where’s your sense of humor?
Imagination: I told you, he’s down in the conference room, waiting to start…
In the meantime, I’ve been sitting at the keyboard trying to think and the best thing I’ve come up with is "I like Star Wars. Isn’t that cool?" So I get fed up with it, chalk it up to another fantastic day of writer’s inaction (it’s not really a block when you quit trying so quickly), and start surfing the net for entertaining articles about things from the 1980s.
I really hope this "union" gag of his doesn’t spread around to my other bits of personified psyche. The last thing I really need in my life is a personality that periodically shuts down to go out and smoke at regular intervals. If worse comes to worse, I could end up being left with only my work ethic (too driven to abide by union rules) and my insecurities (too afraid to join) to run the show. I can only imagine that it’d drive my work ethic to the bottle, and… uhhhh. Ummmm.
Dang, I think the IE just went on break again. I hate that guy. See you next time.
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