Greetings from The Void
Hola, friends and family.
It’s a Saturday afternoon and though I’ve been trying and failing to write something of significance today, I seem to be striking out with all the success of someone like me were I ever to have a go at playing professional baseball. Fun fact: I once went into a batting cage that was shooting baseballs at seventy miles an hour. I thought, due to being young, confident, and deliriously delusional, that I could hack it and maybe summon the abilities of Barry Bonds pre-steroids. Well, I saw the red light flash, signifying that a ball was imminent, and then I heard the slap of a hurtling sportsball hit the leather mat behind me. At what point did it get from one spot to the other? How did I not see it? Haven’t a clue. I think simple human brains aren’t meant to understand things like this. Am I truly an idiot with barely hidden delusions related to my own ability? Or, hear me out, did I happen to be the lone eyewitness to the first ever interdimensional travel i.e. teleportation? I know one seems more likely than the other, but we’re all serious people so I don’t think we should dismiss the scientifically viable latter option. Just in case.
Anyway, this is all to say that writing today is hard. Harder than it should be. Harder than it has any right to be. Whenever I have days like this, I like to tell myself “Don’t be hard on yourself, you dumb brained stupid head. Everyone needs rest days, even failures.” and I think to myself “Damn. That’s a good point.” But the truth is that rest days drive me up a wall. I spend 45 hours a week at a mindlessly menial job with the goal of just writing every time I have a free moment to catch my breath. Let me tell you, this is not ideal. But more importantly, it becomes increasingly annoying when I finally get to my day off and actually have time to write- only to find that there’s absolutely nothing there. What has the past five days been for, Brain? If not to survive until the weekend so that I can finally creatively flourish, then what? Now, when I need you most, you’re going to lay down and play dead? Where was this deceptive energy when I needed it at my aforementioned lifeless day job? I’m very annoyed by your habits. You are not appreciated at all.
Anywho. That’s neither here nor there. I’ve been a bit all over the place lately, which could be playing a big factor in my productivity. In all honesty, I’ve always worried that there will come a time when I no longer have anything I want to write about and on days like this, that seems to be a much more real and looming possibility. On days when I sit down at a computer and find out I literally have nothing, not a single word or well-placed turn of phrase, I do wonder what I’d do if this was the big one, the big moment, the staggering realization that the passion is gone and the fire has burned out. I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably get terribly sad and watch Paddington 2. But then the day passes and eventually I write something else and it’s not bad and I go through the whole relentless cycle again and again.
One day I won’t have anything left to write about, that much is unavoidably true. But, fortunately, I’ve never been one to hide from the fact that I’ve always been reliably good at hurting my own feelings. As such- I know the inspiration and the prose that follow will eventually strike. They just do so in their own time, while I spend each and every gray day sitting in a chair while my life passes by.
It’s strange. It’s very strange.
Strange to weld yourself to one thing, but be bad at making money with it. Strange to choose one path in life even though you know it will only ever trouble you. But life is strange, and even though these days are absolutely maddening I think I’ll always be grateful for the constant chaos that is woven into my day, even if it often does feel like uncertainty and failure. Without those spiderweb cracks, I would be an ordinary man in an ordinary job and that’s about it. Some would say, quite reasonably, that I’m both those things anyway and they wouldn’t be wrong in the least. But! For just a moment, when those threads of mania rage about all the things I could be doing instead of the things I am, it seems like one day I could be something more.
Clearly I’m going through a bit of something right now. I don’t know exactly what that something is, but it’s certainly there. This, in case you’re new to the Luke Ganje experience, is simply how I work things out and make myself feel a bit better. I’m not merely screaming into the void, this just happens to be my void and you’re welcome to hang out in it for a little while. Artistic void, personal void, whatever it winds up being on a day to day basis, I’ve always liked the idea of talking through my annoyances and concerns. It makes them seem real, which is good, because once something is real- it can be addressed and is no longer relegated to some far corner of a dusty mind where it appears as some looming and ominous fog.
So creatively, it’s been a bit of a bump in the road. Personally? About as bumpy. But an ancient old woman did give me a block of suet the other day because she knows I love birds and thought it would help me make friends, so it’s not all bad. Nothing is ever all bad, it just seems that way sometimes.
But for now, I’m going to go stare at a wall (not literally, it’s just where I hang my storyboard for my book projects) and hopefully the next time you hear from me- there will be strange bright things on the horizon.