Butterfly Feet

This post will likely not make ANY sense.

Heck, it might not even be any good. 

My head is in a cloud.  Really, it’s cat brain, (more on that later), and though plenty topics presently flit through my mind as my deadline approacheth… (Not altogether dissimilar to a hapless flock of butterflies who’ve been sucked into a whirling vacuum, and a really big vacuum too, one which I’m also standing in but yet for some reason I’m not susceptible to the vortex — not like the poor butterflies, who look quite frightened, and rather dizzy… Anyway, I stand with my back against a wall, holding on to a giant strip of fly-paper, and trying direly to catch just one — just one idea-a-fly butterfly to pin-up for the blog — and I do even nab one on occasion, but over-and-over as their dainty little butterfly feet land briefly on the sticky-paper which I hold, the wind then violently tears at their wings and rips them away back into the chaos of the maelstrom, leaving me with the feet, or seed of an idea, but no actual butterfly… The poor things…) …I still can’t seem to choose a topic, and so, I got nothing.

(See, even my analogies are off! Screw it I’m changing the title!)

And now, a butterfly Egg. Why? Because I want to. Because I feel guilty for tearing off their feet. Because they're cool, the eggs. Because sometimes things don't have to make sense. Because... You know what? Don't worry about "the because's" -- I got this!

“Think, you stupid brain, Think!” seems to be my only thought — but that won’t get me anywhere and I know it…

God, my head is throbbing… Stupid cats… but I shall write! Why? Because I have to! Because I made a promise to constantly enbetter myself and my skill as a writer by writing every week, despite the foreknowledge that not every week could possibly be my, “all-time-best-post!”. Because I, like so many bloggers before me, concede to the irrefutable fact that I will not always have the best idea, nor will I always stumble across the best inspiration in the world, for… inspiration (nor will I always have the largest variety of words at my disposal, evidently).

So here I am, stuck with only butterfly feet, and thus — this post will not make sense. It’s not meant to. This post is going to be pure bliss. All my wholly undeveloped ideas of the day, soft-boiled, runny, and served up luke-warm on the screen for all of you. You’re welcome?

I’m pretty sure that every blogger gets this way from time to time. All dressed up and no place to go. I generally post on Fridays, and (because that is today) this random agglomeration of tchotchkes and knicknacks will still serve y’all some buffalo wings today, just the same as the restaurant with the same namesake, like it does every week, whether or not it’s on the rag. And so, this post shall be a Non-Post-Post — and my humble homage to the oft’ unheard plight of the blogger — as, try as I might, (and like I said before) I still got nothing!

Though now that I think about it, I wonder if somehow this might be my topic… Perhaps this dervish of half-baked ideas, as a step-rung on the “tall-ass ladder leading toward success”, needs to be highlighted, because otherwise I’m pretty sure it’s completely neglected. Nobody likes to show weakness… Which might be a weird thing to cast in the spotlight, but it’s oddly fitting for me today… So, because of all this, here’s my story (and I’m sticking to it), of all the crackpot ideas I had thrown up on the drawing board, and how they almost came to be — but still just didn’t quite make it in the end.

Here instead is a shot of the drawing board itself, and the story of its inception.

Gee, now I don’t know where to start — Damn cats!

OK, I got it now.

Woh, fine, I default to you, Nelly.

The Grasshopper and the Ant.

This morning I left my house early — far earlier than I’d liked, and long before I’d had a chance to drain my beloved pot of home-brewed coffee. Tomorrow, actually, I’ll be doing the same thing.  Why you ask?  Well, you see… I’m broke.  And not even all the kings horses and men might mend me again unless I get a job.

It’s been a crazy couple months…

In the acting world one must always prepare for the winter, as things basically shut down from early December, pretty much straight on through to the end of February, and so, much like in the story of the grasshopper and the ant, which was one of the posts I was thinking about doing today, I had prepared — like a good little ant always should. I had set aside my three months rent, I was ready to weather the storm and do nothing but sip cocoa and do book edits until march, and I had done all the requisite work in prepping blog topics to be able to claim my Antdom all around — but yet today, as I walked from the subway toward the office which I was destined to interview at for this catering gig, I realized that it wouldn’t work. It would all merely be a lie. It had to be scrapped.

It’s my fault really. I joined my sister Union, “Aftra” late last year, at great expense to me, with the looming promise of making some serious money on a specific show — and I did so even though instinctually it had felt like a bad idea. Well — surprise! — the job fell through (as they often tend to do in this precarious line of work)! No others then presented themselves, and, basically, I wound up paying through the tooth for something that couldn’t possibly now benefit me until, theoretically, the start of March. Hurray! Though, as you might have heard, SAG (of which I am already a member), and Aftra, are now set to merge — after over 30 years of flirting with the idea — meaning that this money sink is now all for naught, as I would have been brought into the new hybrid union de-facto… and likely for free.

I knew I should have gone with my instincts.

Meh, what can you do?

You can’t write about being an Ant — that’s for sure!

I adore animals — I hate them

Dur...

So after leaving my interview, (and scrapping the Grasshopper and Ant Idea), I realized that I was in a neighborhood not to far away from that of a good friend, and so I contacted her, thinking that some good talk and some good coffee might brighten my spirits. Though I had forgotten all about her two cats…

Enter Le’ Darling de duo GATO!

My friend is an awesome person, and she truly did lift my spirits just like I thought she would. We had a lovely, long conversation at her place, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of more money, as we sipped on NY’s finest “Mud” Java, and I, as I adore animals, stroked her cat lovingly, subsequently playing “I Bop You On The Head With This Pen”. That is, all up until I had to get up because I had to sneeze about a bazillion times — which was just as odd as it sounds, but it hadn’t struck me as such at the time (I just figured it worked like an annual internal doctor, and I was just due for a visit from one of those)… So I came back inside, after my breezy retreat to the bathroom, to discover that my friend had taken to a business call — which was all well and good, and, as I had some work to attend to as well, I even joined into the distraction. We then both became busy, for about an hour or so, doing work stuff.

Throughout this time I kept taking breaks to pet and play with her kitties, and I soon began to fantasize about a blog which I might write when I got home having to do with the idea of pure animal love. I do, after all, love all animals, and I could easily chat about how we all could use a dose of their unwavering affections — Ah-Choo! Surely this would make a swell topic of interest — sniffle, sniffle — as I could go on for ages about how amazing they are — Ah-Choo! — and how much fun — Honnnkkk! (Me, blowing my nose) — and this could easialy be the topic of my interests for this friday — Ah-Choo!

Why in the hell do I keep sneezing!?

Turns out I’d caught an allergic reaction, and though I’m not always allergic, today I was suddenly HIGHLY ALLERGIC — so much so to the point that I am currently jotting this blog amidst a visible cloud around my head, and with four squares of toilet paper shoved up into each of my nostrils (that subsequently shoot out across the room like those old school water rockets every time I sneeze — which is often, and not nearly as much fun as the toy).  And so, “I adore Animals” was scrapped…

For if I had written it, it would have been renamed, “I despise all things with fur!”…

Which just wouldn’t be factual… (Speaking of which, I need to shave…)

(I told you, this weeks blog should/might not make sense — you really need to listen;-))

Have A Crappy Day

And so I went home — miserable. I thought about how I was finding it hard to talk through all the intermittent sniffles, and briefly considered a topic on, “The Inefficiency of Language” — But how could I blame this on English? Head throbbing as it was (And still is, Say Thank-Ya), I constantly was reminded of how crappy I’d felt, and realized that without bad days, good ones would a lot less exemplary, and thus I toyed with the idea of, “Have a Crappy day, it’s good for you”, but I really wasn’t having that crappy of a day if I were being honest… It was actually quite random, and filled with events — rather good all around — I would’ve had to have forced it…  I thought about, “I hate my body”, and how I could speak about the various design flaws of the human body (such as the precarious positioning of testicles…), but that just felt complicated and bitter, two things that would have been horrible to write on feeling as I was…

And then I came across this idea…

Why not just talk about this? The process? I mean it wasn’t quite so much an idea, as it was the lack there-of, but, for one reason or another, I fell for it. It seemed crazy, random, and honest — which basically typifies me — and that’s how I knew it was perfect.

As bloggers, or as anybody creative, there is always this pressure to create. We feel exalted when we get to express the refined product resulting from an awesome idea being married to some genuine inspiration, but the process itself, of trying daily — despite the ever-present fear of failure — is oft ignored.

So here you go, my good people.

Here is my process.

I like to think of it like this: What if it’s true, and there are only a finite number of good ideas out there in the world? Well if that’s true, then I invite you all to write a post about nothing, as inevitably you must come across it anyhow as one of the limiting number within your own private cache. Today I looked at it like the “Blank tile” in a game of Scrabble — it’s there for you to use when you’re in a jam, and this week I surely was. But even though in the beginning I thought that it might not make sense, I now beleive that, in the end, it did.

It inspired me for at least a half-dozen more topics to come, and it kept me working through this cat-haze of non-thoughts and butterfly feet.

It also taught me a lesson I’d once known all too well, but forgot long ago;

despite whether or not we are always truly inspired, we should work anyway.

As even by deploying the practice, regardless of the quality, we will, nonetheless, improve.

~J