Gumballs

In the middle of Chemo 3 and realized that my writing has dropped off.

This is disturbing.  When I'm traveling, in a new country or town, the imperative to write is so strong that sometimes I just have to stop and capture it as quickly as possible.  Everything is new, and interesting, and triggers so many thoughts and connections that I just can't wait to put it in words.  But, after awhile, I acclimate and the popcorn popping frenzy of ideas starts to slow down.  Oh yeah, another gothic cathedral.  Oh yeah, another train through the rubber plantations of Malaysia.

So I fear that I am now getting acclimated to being in treatment.  To feeling sick.  To being This Person. 

I don't want to be This Person, this person who is sick and bald and half formed and in the middle of the chrysalis. I want to be caterpillar, or moth.  And, if I have to be neither, I want to be interested enough in the process of this weird unknowable change to want to write about it more.  (And, in some self defense, my neck has been terribly out of whack from too much keyboard time for the past two weeks, so the physical act of writing has had to be very constrained, just to try to heal up.)

Still, I realized this morning that the gumballs haven't been coming down the shoot as frequently.  It's always felt to me that I get the ideas for these little musings like gumballs, arriving down a fun winding shoot like at those big Chuck E Cheese machines (that cost, like a buck, because of the sheer funness of watching them cascade down the shoot).  My gumballs also arrive down a fun shoot, and they appear randomly.  They consist, usually, of a thought or two that collide and do something interesting. 

I'm not really sure what they will produce, but they brush up against each other, these gumball encapsulated thoughts, and they usually produce a kind of frisson that sparks up my interest.  When they are really crackling, words start forming in my head and then those words acquire a frenetic urgency, filling my brain up until I just can't help but start writing them down.

The amazing can't-wait-to-get-them-down words usually, mostly, evaporate when I'm at the keyboard, which is too bad.  But new words invariably take their place.  And they generally start writing themselves. The me inside my head sort of sits back and watches, like a kid at a big magic game board, where the characters and movements have taken on lives of their own.  Sometimes I interject and move something around, and sometimes I can pause the action and try to figure out where it's going, but mostly I sit back and watch, taking my cues from the action in front of me and trying, as best I can, to keep my ego/brain/editor/self out of it.

It's intensely enjoyable, of course.  And I know that I can go back and turn the editor on again.  But here's the trick: I get one gumball at a time.  And the faster I pull it out of the shoot and chew on it, the faster the next one comes.  Sometimes, when things are really hopping, I'll get two.  But mostly it's just one at a time, and the time it takes me to pop it in my mouth and suck the juices out of it generally informs how long it will be before I get the next one.  In short: use it or lose it.  It's interesting.

I chew on these things and stuff comes out.  I'm usually surprised when someone quotes something I've written.  It seems dimly familiar, like I've read it somewhere, and (I have to admit) I'm usually pleasantly surprised.  But... it came more out of the gumball than out of me.  It just, kind of, appeared.

Is this revealing too baldly how fun this is?  I'm sorry.  I know, writing is supposed to be arduous and hard.  And I have been working at the craft itself for, yup, a really long time.  But blogs are not really the real deal yet.  If I ever go back and clean all this up and put it in some kind of formal form, trust me, it will take many revisions and painstaking cleaning up.  So this is not that.  This is gumball snatching, grabbing the goodies from the shoot, chewing them up, and sharing the flavors that emerge.