Cacophany and mayhem

When I decided I wanted to be a writer eight years ago, one of the reasons I thought this was a good idea for myself was that I knew writing is hard. Good, I thought, it will continue to be a challenge for a long time so I won't get bored with it after five years. What I've discovered since then is that it is much harder than I thought, but not for the reasons I expected. The hardest thing, day after day, year after effing year, is simply to sit down and do it. And the bitch of it is that the more I want it, the harder it gets. The more I feel like what I'm about to write matters—like, it's going to get me something tangible—the harder it is for me to get it out. So we come to my number one distraction: anxiety. And really, in my world that amounts to all-out panic far more often than I am in the habit of admitting.

I seem to have a certain kind of mind that can be characterized as such: I live within an ongoing inner cacophony that is both the source of all my creativity and, in the deepest sense, all my distractions. The thing is, I think I'm actually capable of blocking pretty much anything external out. [Major exception: jack hammers.] It's a knack I've had since childhood. I was so good at it actually that my dad used to stand in front of me, pause as if to take in the complete and utter detachment from my surroundings that I had visibly achieved, and say, "Earth to Marin! Earth to Marin!" It was sort of a ceremonial greeting. I do take some pride in having overcome, for the sake of my social existence, this tendency. And it's true I'm not as good at it as I used to be. But the point is I think I still can pull it off if I have to.

The thing that concerns me, then, are these inner distractions. It's not ADD, but it's something vaguely comparable. My brain goes here, then it goes there, then it goes somewhere else, then it comes back—but just for a minute—and then it's off again. The good thing is that it's clear to me that this process has something to do with how I manage to be creative, and particularly how I come up with my ideas, which are, as I like to say, "so ME." The bad thing is that as these thoughts happen, they sort of bang into each other all the time. Shit's always bouncing off of other shit, and then I'm chasing after something, and hit a wall, and pause to look at something pretty, and trip on something, and on and on. My thoughts aren't thoughts so much as they're collisions. My head is like that paper route video game from the 80's, where you have to navigate on your bike without something disastrous happening like getting run over by the blind old lady. Only it's in reverse; instead of throwing newspapers, I'm grabbing them out of the air as they fly by. I'm not kidding—it's mayhem in here, people, and if you read this and say in response, "But you sound so coherent and logical," all I can say to that is that I have heard that before. And I still have no idea how it manages to come out in such an apparently orderly fashion. Because that is absolutely not, I mean not remotely, what it looks like where it came from. And the truth is, I only know I'm making sense because people tell me so. And I do ask. Often.

This cacophony—the way things come together and engender, for instance, the Distraction Project—is both my favorite thing in life, and the bane of my existence. Because it's somehow related to the fact that it's extremely, extremely difficult for me to just sit down, hour after hour, day after day, and write about what I'm supposed to be writing about. It's connected to this low-grade agitation I seem to almost always feel, which just grows when I'm under pressure until I basically buckle. That's part of why, when I write, I want to write about whatever's in my head right now. Not what I'm getting paid to think about. Or supposed to think about even if I'm not getting paid. Either way. That sounds very artistic, I'm sure, but the reality is much less glamorous. Because the reality is that it isn't about writing what I want, it's about writing within a structure, or not. No matter what I "want" to write about, I have to put it in a structure that does NOT resemble the inside of my head in order for it to make sense. And in order to do that, I have to truly become a physical embodiment of a much calmer, more focused reality than the one inside my head. And THAT'S hard.

So, as I've maybe said before, the Distraction Project is in part an effort to sort through what distracts me, and basically figure out how to write. Maybe it's just about discipline. Or feeling like it has a point. Or just being excited about the discoveries. Maybe external factors are far more important than I realize. And if so, maybe I can figure out what works best for me. Maybe the way for me to write is to write short. Oh, but that's so tragic if it's true. I have of course tried lots of different tactics and techniques, so I'll describe what's happened with those in the coming weeks, before the Experiment gets underway. Then, let the wild rumpus start!

First article effort set for June

Wow. Sometimes people inspire you and sometimes they leave you speechless. I went to a weekly meeting at Meow Wolf artist collective last night to see about getting permission/support for my idea of placing a desk in their way for a week to do my first time-based article. I knew one person there, out of about 15, and generally in circumstances like this, having to stand up and describe CTD coherently to people who had no idea what it was, I'd be pretty intimidated. But the whole vibe there was so welcoming, warm, and fun, that I almost immediately felt comfortable.

After an hour or so of sitting around a circle going over "business stuff," they shifted focus to their upcoming June show—a massive installation project called Habitat, for which they're going to fill the entire MW space with all manner of sculptural/performance/whatever artwork that relates to the idea of home. The project has barely begun to be developed so far. Nick Chiarella unveiled (with an eloquent dedicatory speech, I should add) a half-scale model of the MW building, which everyone then more or less jumped on and began playing around with ideas for structures they could build as the framework for the show. Somewhere in there I had a few words with Emily Montoya, who suggested that maybe I'd like to do CTD in conjunction with Habitat in some way. It opens in mid-June, she said. I thought that would work well, so halfway through the discussion, she announced that Habitat had its first real "idea." Then everyone was staring at me and I began explaining my concept and what I wanted to do in the MW space. Amazingly, I started seeing eyes widen and heads nod, and when I finished several people said, "That's a really cool idea!" So there it was.

But that, it turned out, was just the beginning. A couple of guys started peppering me with questions. "Could we incorporate that into Habitat?" "Like, could other people use your desk to write in when you're not here?" "Could we leave a typewriter on it for anyone to use?" "What if the desk moved across the floor?" "And then ended up in like an empty office? Like it comes home." "What if we projected your words onto the wall behind you?" I said I had thought of that and wasn't sure I was ready to be that exposed yet. "We could project the words backward then, or sideways, or any way you want." I mean, this all happened in the first five minutes.

I conceived of CTD, in part, as a way to have a collective experience even while engaged in the solitary pursuit of writing. I think my experience here is going to be much bigger, and much more participatory, than I expected. And I think its going to involve way more of what someone last night referred to as "manic creativity" than I had envisioned. The surprises have already begun! It makes me think of a list of performance-art tenets I scribbled down and stuck up on the fridge on the morning I came up with the CTD idea. I was inspired by a New Yorker profile about performance artist Marina Abromovich, and a group of artists in the 1970s who decided it should be done this way:
No rehearsal
No predicted end
No repetition
Extended vulnerability
Exposure to chance
That's what I wanted to do with CTD. Amazingly, I'm already doing it.