On the mornings like today and earlier this week when I’ve found a groove with writing and playing with ideas and words, I don’t want to stop. I resent the need to stop, the need to pay attention to the clock, to get a shower and walk the dog and drive to work all to arrive at a reasonable hour and forget everything that I had been engrossed in… and then, after a long day, do everything in reverse, drive home, walk the dog, make some dinner, go to bed etc. etc. It’s on these mornings that I lean in to Alan Watts’ suggestion, that looking at a rubber band on your finger (or in my case writing) can be as important as anything else you could do. In these moments, the flow of writing, playing, imagining is as important as anything I could do.
Today I woke up at 5:30. I spent an hour working on a poem or story or I’m not sure what. It’s about the collapse of the staple remover industry – because do we really need to be producing more staple removers? It seems like there must be a limit to the demand. I think I have at least two of them here at the house. We don’t throw them away – even when one of the plastic ear-shaped pieces breaks off. These were the thoughts that came to me in the predawn hours just before getting out of bed. How are those lines of production profitable? There must be people employed at these companies who study labor trends and use complex formulas to predict supply and demand. These ideas felt just absurd enough to make a good slice of life tale from 30,000 feet. The PowerPoint presentations about declining sales. The left-over tortoiseshell-colored plastic molds that need to be melted down and resold. The crumbling home lives about to break because of the stresses of a pandemic and rapidly shifting market conditions. What happens when the bottom drops out of staple pullers? Of course, it’s not really about destaplers at all. For me, the practice was about trying to imagine the meetings that take place over zoom or in some darkened board room that shut down a production line in Ohio. For me, this is what’s fascinating and absurd about all of it… this world of work and commerce and pushing papers that are held together by a tiny staple which needs to be removed because you made one too few copies for the lunch and learn.
I didn’t get to work through the ideas long enough to really go anywhere with them. I needed more than an hour. I didn’t get to build the lives of Donna and Steve – two mid-level managers at different companies. I didn’t get to explore the small battles to more prominently place destaplers in the image that accompanies the ad for the the list of twenty essential items needed for our new normal of working from home. By the time I get home later today and finish my zoom calls and walk the dog and have a glass of wine, I’ll have forgotten most of this… or it will have lost its urgency. I’ll have spent too many hours in the very practical and real world of my day-to-day to think that this story or poem or whatever it is has any value. If I’m lucky, tomorrow morning I’ll be willing to stare at a different rubber band and if I’m really lucky, I’ll return to this one with intensity and curiosity and the desire to play a little longer.