Aesthetic Part One, Take Two: Another Approach

Let's try this again.

Evening. The dark window sitting behind me, reveals to me the cold world outside, and among the 12 singly-paned pieces of glass a landscape of students coming to and fro, some inside, some to that octagonal edifice of a workout center, all atop the layers of snow that has impeded man and his herd of vehicles. I sit and contemplate closing the blinds or keeping them open, rather than filling up that empty plain of a Word document save for a name, a class, and an assignment. Paper number 1. Art or German or Computer Science or something like that. Something I care deeply enough about to keep it off until the after-dinner hour, Thursday night, wedged into the end of the week by other empty Word or emacs documents that were miraculously filled with only minutes to spare. I hope for a similar situation. I hope to cut a hole through my head and let those ideas flow out on this glowing monstrosity, or save that, build a machine that I can plug into the USB port and will take care of things for me, a couple concepts or themes at a time. That's years away, and unfortunately, I am in the present, and five minutes have passed. I should be thinking about computer architecture or the effect of Romanticism on German thought, or what to write to video. Whatever it is I need to do. I commence the thought process by walking down the hall to fill up my borrowed Kitchen Gourmet brand water-heater-kettle whatever-it's-called. It's a white cylinder and I wonder how I could describe the water level inside of it as a function of how much it's tilted under the arc of the water coming out of the stainless steel box in front of me. At this angle, the rate at which the water rises is decreasing, but will eventually become asymptotic, until it overflows and I curse a few angry words for pressing a metal button down too long. These are the things I think about. I've been here long enough.

Plugged in, that white cylinder is a chorus of air bubbles nucleated at the bottom of a gray circle that underneath is some sort of coil or ceramic heating element. The circle that the bubbles come out of suggests a coil. I could be wrong. It begins with a low hum, then it becomes an ebullient simmer, and then a roiling, toiling boil. It huffs and puffs and lets out invisible clouds of moisture and wets the air inside this dried out room. With a satisfying click, I rotate the dial to "off." The choir ends their song. I pick it up and empty out the hot water into the stainless steel travel mug I swagged from work, complements of some engineering firm, Johns Manville. Maybe they design water heaters or travel mugs. Or better yet, osmosis machines that you can attach directly to your brain into your USB port. There's always technology not yet marketed out there. I could not be completely crazy. I unwrap a bag of tea with another satisfying rustle of a sound and dip it into it's bath, in and out, until it's dark and soaked with it's briny, earthy goodness. This will keep me going for a while, I hope.

I set the mug down like a gavel on the wooden expanse of a desk, atop which is that aluminum-clad, wonderful technology that I have devoted my college days to sitting at and staring intently into for hours upon hours a day. The plain of a forested plane is scattered with the debris of academic warfare, a few depleted shells of radiant orange post it notes, missiles of pens and penciles, bloodied battlegrounds of syllabi and scribbled notes. Below them were signs from other times, like a note from my girlfriend, taped down and immortalizing the time she noticed I had made her the background of that aluminum laboratory in front of me. Among the wastes stand empty factories or office buildings, a civilization of technological life-enhancers. I can work inside this Bluetooth mouse and avoid having to commute to my computer. I can live inside a cell phone. I can recall my memories in this stack of digital video tapes. And towering above them is the inverted silo of caffeinated, bitter water. It feeds me, sustaining this distorted sense of time and alertness.

And still, the empty word document. I consider taking notes, and resurrect the dead from battle. I steal from the graveyard of deceased papers and desecrate their blank, untrodden side. I write in large letters. I write in small letters, equally unintelligible. It is all to no avail. I draw a bunny, or something resembling a broken cat. I start typing instead. The keys are a pitter-patter of activity for a few seconds. Then they fall into a slumber. Then they awaken with more intensity and die with equal decorum. This repeated pattern of life and death, planting and picking yields a meager crop of words, and together a short bale of sentences. Not nearly enough for an introduction. If words are all I have, then I am homeless and living under a bridge. I take great pride in the few precious ideas already presented, I search them over and feel them for their soundness. I look up a word in the dictionary. I look up another on Wikipedia. From there, a viral explosion of encyclopedic knowledge, the result of distraction, a fascination with hyperlinks to other articles, and tabbed browsing. God how I love wikipedia and all it's encompassing knowledge.

I decide this is bad way to do things. It's hours since I began. Probably two of them. Still a lot of time to develop relatively little, a lot of time to develop the rest of a relative lot. I pace the halls and discuss how we try to internalize nature and how it leads to an inner struggle. Or maybe it was the best way to execute thread synchronization. People look at me when I talk aloud about art and it's consequences. I end up in my friend's room and do a "I'm thinking about things" dance. First the left. Then the right. Then the left a step behind. The right in a similar fashion. Repeated a couple times, with the head down, arms moving as if I am waxing philisophically. Of course, I am. But I'm not nearly as prolific as Plato or motivated like Thomas Mann. I come to something and realize I need to write it down. Or carry around a tape recorder. I lose it and have to start over again.

It wasn't completely a loss. I wrote down a few concepts on my hands. Now I have to carry them out. Save for a name, a class, an assignment, and a few introductory statements, nothing. But soon I'll have something. I look back over the literature. It's as dense as the book it's written in, chock full of information surrounded by examples, anecdotes, internal citations, political dialogue, administrative statements, bureaucratic language, a sense of academic haughtiness, and topped with sprinkles. A single page is intellectually nutritious as a klondike bar. I could use some ice cream. The warm tea hasn't tempered my hunger. I settle on Corn pops, 'cause hey, I gotta have my Pops. They crackle as I cut through their ersatz popped-corn and sugar-coated surface and marvel at the taste of ... corn in cereal form? I could use some soy milk. I puncture the foil opening of one with their little expandable straw and let it pour onto my Pops like a small trickle of milk, but pressed from the bodies of little green pods and somewhat less environmentally detrimental. These are still things I shouldn't be thinking about.

The creative process has stalled. I take a kleenex and release my congestion. I do it again for good measure and shoot the wadded piece of grossness into the trashcan like I'm shooting hoops. Brick. I have to pick that up eventually. My eyes hurt and the letters are blurry. The computer has stolen my soul and has taken on an overbearing role in my life. It isn't that much bigger than a five-subject notebook, but thrice as hefty. It could scorn me like an overbearing mother and beat me up and steal my lunch money like a school-yard bully. It could steal my job, if it had arms. It's probably also somewhat more handsome. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend would break up with me just to be with it. I'm beginning to resent this thing. I'm beginning, that is to say I'm pretty sure I've already started a long time ago, I'm going crazy. The computer has put me in its chains and shackled me to this desk.

I put my head down on my folded hands and drift off. The music I started playing becomes ironic, with lots of uptempo electronic beeps and blips, and obtuse lyrics to match. I look up from an acute angle, and now I'm three millimeters tall, looking up at the facade of a glowing screen, like I'm a small-town boy living in a large, cosmopolitan city. People look different and talk different and everything is unfamiliarly large. If ideas are like water, then this paper is doomed to shrivel up and become a desert, a barren wilderness of topical development. I'll get through this if it takes me until 12 hours from now when it's due. Oh, and it's Friday. Morning. Early. Past my normal 1 o'clock shut-eye time. I look out the window, and like before, a street, the snow, the towering polygon of a fitness facility, and no one. Like a b-movie of a post-apocalyptic future. Except it's happening now and I'm alone with this silver rectangle with buttons on it. It's my only key to saving the world and I don't want to. Let it burn, or fry, or roast. I'm so hungry. I just want to sleep to dream about filet wrapped with pancetta. I will end up waking up with my comforter in my mouth. I try again. It's blurry. I type. It's incoherent. I'll do this in the morning.

I shut the lid and put my head down. Somehow I wake up in a fetal position. I look out the window and see the people, going to and fro. How do they deal with writer's block?