Desert Ponderings

I decided to take a bunch of my "loose notes" with me to Joshua Tree, as I figured I would be spending a good bit of time by myself while Sarah was spending time taking care of her mom.

These were the thousands of loose scraps of paper onto which I have scribbled ideas, over the years, in the hope of "eventually turning them into a useful article or blog post."

Maybe it's profoundly self-involved of me to think that all these fleeting ideas are actually "good enough" to become a worthy piece of writing. As I am revisiting them now, many of them seem rather nonsensical... and it makes me wonder whether I am just wasting a bunch of time by trying to "capture" ideas when they happen, because I harbor hopes of "saving them" for some time when I actually have the time to turn them into "something."

I am, in so many ways, a "frustrated writer." Mostly, I am frustrated because I have to spend all my daily energy on making a living, and it leaves no time over for writing... and I can't afford to simply say "today I am going to write!" because doing so is likely going to result in the electricity being cut off.

Which would suck.

It makes me sad that "creative types" are typically "underemployed," from a financial compensation perspective.

At age 54, I have never been employed at anything that allowed me any more than to merely "scrape by." Which sounds kind of stupid, because I have a college degree (with high honors, no less) in Finance that I have never used for anything. But the financial field never held any appeal... I merely completed the degree to satisfy parental and family pressures.

Sometimes this whole dilemma makes me sit and ponder what we "value" in society, and how rarely those things that "pay well" are in creative fields... and how (sadly) often they are in fields that involve destruction and deception. That doesn't speak very highly of us, as human beings.

Anyway, here I am, trying to sort all these pieces of paper with "great ideas" sketched on them-- and i feel very overwhelmed.

Keeping Notes of Ideas

I have long been "scribbling notes" every time I get an idea, and I am not somewhere where I can act on that idea in the moment.

Come to think of it, 95% of my ideas for writing come at moments when I am nowhere near the computer-- so I always carry scraps of paper and a pen or pencil with me, wherever I go. When something "comes up," I pause for a moment and scribble... and then go back to what I was doing.

All the notes end up on my desk, and then get sorted "by topic" into a box... eventually.

The "problem" with this kind of system is that I never seem to find the time to actually sit down and make the number of notes in the box diminish.

On the upside, I do manage to sort things out from time to time... and I often discover that (over a period of years) the same basic ideas come up, over and over. And that's a good sign that I should probably take the time to develop them further.

On the downside, a lot of ideas come up "in the heat of the moment," and I end up sitting at my desk, contemplating what I was actually thinking, when I wrote the note in the first place. WHY did I think that was such a great idea? No idea...

I guess it's just part and parcel of being a frustrated writer that I never have time enough to sit down and develop my ideas when they come up. I easily have enough material for three articles (or more) per DAY... but I don't have the time to do anything with them. "Time," of course, is a nebulous concept... the truth is that I don't have the money to take the day of (every day!) to develop my ideas...