I hadn’t thought the COVID block which many writers are mentioning on Twitter was afflicting me, but it may be. It may also be the extra extra stress of being one of the few still at The Regular Job atop the previously-mentioned extra stress, the latter of which is even stressier at the transition from one month to the next. It’s almost certainly responsible for the torpor which overtook me on Tuesday, and yesterday it quite cut into my writing time.
Hopefully next week will see some lowering of pressure, and I certainly am aware that I’m neither as crushed as anyone in Healthcare, nor anything like as mentally burdened as those who find themselves out of work and weeks away from the various government assistance plans coming into effect… and who aren’t sure if those plans will actually include them.
On that last point– Canadians who are worried about such things should have a look at this chart, in which helpful people have translated from the various levels of government’s official mystical utterances into something which can be understood.
† The letter to which I respond arrived just before Christmas. I plead “really a lot of powerful distractions”.
‡ The last time I used this pen (not quite two years ago, I discover with alarm), I also used brown ink. The only rationale for this association I can think of is that brown was big in the ’70s.
I am, by the way, still at work. The Regular Job turns out to count as “essential services”, and I’m apparently essential to it, so I’ll be the last one out before management is made to lock the doors. Let’s all hope it doesn’t come to that.
Oh, I’ll bet I’ve spelled that wrong; I’ll be writing ROMANI ITE DOMUM all over the forum for the rest of the day, now.
In any event, tomorrow is the sesquicentennial of Canada as an independent country (as recognized by European nations). We do this on the first of the July not to sneak in before the US’s national celebration, but because having a summer celebration is much better than one in winter, and because it one is free to choose, why not the first of the month? It makes for a tidy calendar.
Today’s films, therefore, are little bits of national history programming which we occasionally get to enjoy rather than adverts on TV. There’s plenty of them, and I’ve chosen ones that I think give a pretty good sense of the sort of interior mixture of pride and regret that a lot of Canadians are steeping in currently.
Today’s pen: Pelikan M600
Today’s ink: Chelpark Black
(Not Canadian? Oh, dear, me– we’re a mosaic of many cultures here. They’re in Canada, so they’re as Canadian as I am)
The timorous cowering away from the big project of last week became a (probably regrettable) examination of the least possible effort to bring the thing to a conclusion. I don’t think that’s quite what the chap running the workshop at the end of last month meant by his advice to always be finishing something, but it does get that phase of it off my neck. In an attempt to hew somewhat closer to the spirit of the advice, I think I’m going to turn to some more second, third and 10,000-grit-polish drafts of some other stuff. If nothing else, I’ll renew the illusion of momentum I’ve been dazzling myself with.
If you accuse me of laziness in not getting back at the big choose-your-own project, I will defend vigourously with a claim of cowardice; the necessary extra work, even though less than what has already been done, intimidates me. There’s also something not dissimilar to luxurious greed or even lust, because the two little things I’ve knocked out this week have really been offering themselves to me and producing the sort of endorphin effects I think writers and work-out fanatics both pursue in their separate ways.
A couple of reasons for the change of project today. First, there was yesterday’s triumph of completion followed by the needle-across-record sound of realizing I’d forgotten a bunch of stuff that I’d meant to do after I finished a bit about a month ago. I need a break from that damn thing, and a short and hopefully humorous story is just the ticket.
There’s not much of it because the expected letter of rejection appeared in my inbox this morning. It was very polite, and Stoic philosophy is really a good way of keeping life’s blows from smarting, but… well, the wind isn’t out of my sails, but they are out of trim.
Or, to shift metaphor, I’ll see about getting Mickey to cut me, and then it’ll be back into the ring, no problem.
Someone just showed me a excerpt from a monumentally creepy comic, and I want to share it with all of you. You’ll have to skip over the the site where it’s been scanned in, and be careful to not look ahead at the thumbnails, but it’s really worth it.
If, that is, you haven’t been having enough nightmares lately.
The production numbers seem down, and they are (apart from the glorious anomaly of yesterday). Part of why I’d set this project aside was that the neatening up of threads was getting a little daunting, and while I’ve managed to work up a head of courage sufficient to tackle the work again, willingness isn’t reducing the complexity of the thing. Those who have tried tablet-weaving may recognize the difficulty of resuming a multi-thread effort after setting it aside for a while.
Today’s pen choice is driven by a writing workshop that I’m going to on the weekend (alluded to in this entry); in that setting, a favourite pen and preferred ink seem the wise thing, and today confirms that they like each other.
