What is there to talk about? Really I’m just starting this journal as a sort of open notebook. How does journaling on a computer differ from journaling on paper? That’s what I want to explore. And to add to this, I want to explore that feeling of being lost deep inside oneself yet profoundly present when you drop into a space of creativity. These appendages I label as my hands aren’t really doing my bidding as much as I am staying out of the way of their higher plan. If I really sit back and empty myself from the self I pretend I have – my baggage of thoughts, my seasonal desires, and my most thorny regrets – what there is is nothing but the reflection of what has always been there. The creation then just appears from a source through me where I don’t filter it. Untainted water directly from the holy source. And here I have hit a “writer’s block.” The term captures something relating to the piping in my head, this current of ideas, being clogged or muted, perhaps by lost trails or dead ends. But that places me as the helpless witness of this blockage. And yes, I am helpless to how this thought evolves itself and decides to form at the conscious surface, but in fact there is no blockage, just myself blocking the flow. I have put my concept of self and how I want to filter reality in the way of what is trying to be said. When I block, really I am just in the way. I have judged myself and allowed this judgement to seep into what is trying to leap onto the page. I have second-guessed my own thought with another thought, a kind of thought sparring where the victor comes out maimed and no less dead than the loser. Thoughts kill thoughts. Let each other be, god damn thoughts! These little trickles of judgemental thoughts are where all good ideas go to be razed at the knees. An enrapturing snowflake of a thought carved into a simple circle.

But don’t be fooled that when you have cleansed yourself of internal dialogue that it won’t seep into your palette through craftier means. The word processing tool I am using generally stares at me with a grim black and white hunch, but once I slip into a pattern that doesn’t follow its programming, boy does it become high with colours. Reds! Blues! Greens everywhere! And my brain knows just what to do with these. To have me pause the output and question what was just spoken. No commitment like I am driving home a point with mini knives on sharp wood. Instead a butter knife that is begging to carve a plastic bowl and then has questioned its utility. We can’t let these thoughts be so impure and get away with it. There are those that want to change your thoughts to fit the mould of the moment. Never mind the mould of the decade. Don’t say this, avoid this, people will enjoy that, this piece is distasteful, try to incorporate more imagery to sync other reader’s mind patterns with your own. It should be presented as: An Instruction Manual on How to Process Your Thoughts.

Now don’t get me wrong. Thoughts must have an origin that is heavily affected from our time in education. No one develops a style or an understanding of common sentence structure as standard hardware at birth. But there seems to be this cadence between time scales here. These long term thought influences are generally there to stay for most people. The more subconscious ones will be present even if we are unaware of its influence. These short term ones though are what I am trying to get at here. We seem to have developed a defence mechanism to deal with the influence of short term thought-carvers: we return to written pieces, rewrite them, digest them, and shape them like a log made of putty. It’s bloody and beautiful. This means that every thought is charging through a front line barrage of other thoughts battering it in every direction as it finally breaks out of the subconscious barrier and makes it to the safety of the conscious realm to be laid to rest as a worthy soldier on the next point in the page. The wounded have scars and mishaps which we must nurse them through. Some soldiers end up being enemy spies. We must be careful to examine our survivors and return them to their purest form. In a sense, we make a pearl. The impurity of first arrival becomes something far more perfect, in fact a regression to when it once was perfect before it was mishandled. The average direction of all directions is nowhere. So must allow our thoughts to be hit in every direction by all the other short term thoughts that we encounter on the day, on the hour, and on the minute, and once our poor thought has made it through its trial, we can say we have arrived at the source. The source of what was to be said by the origin of our creativity. I suppose I am making a case that I believe in some purest creative source at the core of every person. But don’t entangle creativity with greatness and revelation. Just give creativity its due as the most truthful form of one’s outside appearance of their inside.