Ideas

Tonight's post is brought to you by the often overly industrialized mind of Mr. Miles Jay Oliver.

My plan was to just take the night off totally. Not to paint or to work on any extracurricular clubland activities. Not to spend all night wasting time playing Words With Friends or cleaning. Not doing any of the things that waste my time in general (and more often than not).

I watched one of the film submissions (which I'm hoping will be accepted by the committee for the festival - I feel like I'm saying this about the majority of those I've seen), and I loaded a bunch of dirty clothes into the washer. In the load, I included the jeans I wore to work today since I've been leaving with my clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and machine shop utilities. It wasn't until a half hour later, when I was making my daily six-o'clock phone call to Ryan and looking for my cigarettes, that I realized I'd left a nearly full pack in my jeans pocket when I threw them in the wash. Needless to say, I spent time re-washing and picking little pieces of tobacco and bleached white butts out of of the machine. Cigarettes are expensive, and that's basically a five dollar loss that I can't afford, especially since that pay check I keep bringing up is still lost somewhere in outer space - seeing as not one of the multiple people I've called and left messages with at the practice seems to know where the hell my money is right now.

Sometime between the evening phone calls and the sanitizing of the washing machine and dryer, something occurred to me that I haven't given much serious thought to recently. It was an idea that struck me so hard in one of those moments of perfectly serendipitous convergence of everything that shows up in just the right place at just the right time, so hard that I literally froze for a few seconds before leaning back on the pillows propped up against my headboard and allowed the idea to bounce around in my brain.

This idea of mine involves a pet writing project that I've had since the late nineties. It's one that I take out and play with when the time is right and I'm on track with regularly writing, but I always put it back away because I end of feeling like the time isn't right or I don't have the perfect outlet in which to express it. Despite never feeling that the right moment will ever arrive, I've held onto the concept of what I'd like to do long enough to know that someday, at just the right time, I'll pull it out and see it to its fruition. During those moments, I remember a very good friend, Juli (one of the many relationships that I allowed my past alcoholic behaviors to rob me of), telling me that her mother always telling her that, one day, she will write a book. Her mother is now in either her sixties or seventies and still repeating the same declaration, yet no book has been written. Juli often told me just to write and to see where my writing leads me instead of the other way around. If I keep waiting, I'll be in my forties and never have really done what I wanted to pursue my goal.

Rather than revealing everything in this open format, I will write that I talked to the person whose text message spawned my idea and made plans to meet with the right person who could help me make this long-standing dream a reality. Either tomorrow evening at eight or Tuesday afternoon before my home group, I'll have the chance to sit down and discuss this thing I want to do with someone who has the power to either encourage or to not accept (not to discourage; I'm too fired up again and brimming with my outlook on the project).

Maybe this meeting will have the best possible outcome, maybe it won't. Either way, I am determined that, no matter what, this is something I've been sitting on for entirely too long to just allow another day to pass without pushing it from my brain and onto the page.

I'll do this. Without knowledge or expectation of where it ends up.