Barren

The Deep End #1

First of all, I wanted to say how very bad I feel for you people.

The bottom of the totem pole.

The sh*t end of the stick.

The last mealy apples at the bottom of an old barrel filled with water. There’s some mold growth silently living in the swollen planks. On a half drunken Halloween, people are sticking their heads in the lukewarm water. The white makeup on their faces in a half-baked attempt at Dracula is running off their skin and turning the water gray.

That’s where you are now. Do we have an understanding here?

Good. Because I don’t either.

What I’m saying is that I am truly sorry for you people.

Especially after sticking with Melissa’s slam dunk Pulitzer Prize-winning, Nobel laureate-esque writing that she’s been churning out like hot cakes in the form of the all new Thinking Man column, Think Tank. (TM) ((That’s trademark. NOT Thinking Man. But it fits I guess.))

You’ve made it to Saturday. You’ve been in the wading pool all week. Getting a sweet tan and sipping a strawberry daiquiri. Is the name of a beverage supposed to be capitalized?

Now the water is colder. The clouds are rolling in. I bet you should’ve taken those swimming classes you had always dreamed of as a kid. Let the thought of drowning poke back into the crevices of your psyche.

You’ve slipped away from the normalcy. From the genius of Thinking Man. You stuck your hand too far down into the Think Tank. You slipped. Lost your grip. Tumbled through to the very bottom of the barrel.

You ended up with me.

You ended up in the deep end.

And for that, I am truly sorry.

The title for today’s post came to me when I woke up.

“Barren.”

A lot of my best ideas come to me when I’m unable to jot them down. A notepad, or my phone, is too far out of reach. The clutches of sleep desperately try to pull me back into its black oblivion. My neck is craned. The back of my head just centimeters off the pillow. I flail for the phone to get whatever idea, good or not, down and into existence. Before it slips away forever.

It never works.

Sometimes. A lot of times, I’ll be driving. Inspiration shoots at me from a funnel aimed straight for my skull. But I’m on the Cross Island going sixty. The sun is partially blinding me. Cars surround me on both sides and front and back. A reach for the phone means certain death. Or pretty bad injuries.

So I let them go too. Gone forever. The ideas I later write down should be ashamed of themselves in comparison to their forefathers who had been birthed through sleep and through high speed, late-for-work driving antics. The forced ideas that I try to recreate on a desk, in a coffee shop, at the library—they never seem to live up to the great ideas I had.

I’ve written three books. All unpublished. For now! Mind your manners “dear” reader. But yes, I’ve written the books, and swear none of them contain the best ideas I’ve come up with for them. Those ideas are in a little burial ground somewhere deep in the inner corners of my mind.

Why is it that all great ideas seem to come when you’re least available to write them down? In the car. In bed. Butt naked (is it buck?) in the shower. I guess you’re relaxed. Letting go of the creative part of your mind to kind of do its own thing.

I’m not getting into that, I don’t really care about contemplating it. You can. I’ll wait here. Alright, you good? Great. Let’s continue.

The reason I’m saying this is due to the fact that this piece marks the first in my weekly column on Thinking Man, titled The Deep End. (How original…) ((Yea thanks for agreeing.))

I’ve been thinking of what to write about all week. It had been hanging over my head for the better part of everyday. As Jimmy Chamberlin, the great drummer of The Smashing Pumpkins once said, “When you have a guy like Billy Corgan bringing hits to the studio everyday, you need to make sure you can give it your all to really do justice.”

Is Melissa like Billy Corgan? Yes, she’s the heart and soul of this publication. And I am by no means even close to the complement Chamberlin is to Corgan, but I have to try to do her justice here.

And I had nothing.

Until this morning.

For the first time in a long time. I woke up with an idea. Well actually, it was a word.

Barren.

This time, by some miracle. It stuck.

Half hungover, the word sprayed across my mind with an image of waves crashing onto a beach. One beach in particular. Jones Beach.

My plan, and piece, had been hatched.

Get to Jones Beach. Talk a crisp walk on the boardwalk on an unseasonably warm day, and take in the barren beach in winter.

To the shock of no one, the beach was sprawling with life. Not sea creatures, or algae. But real genuine (Jen-You-Ine) human beings up and about taking in the warm sun with coats meant for the fall, all while the cool ocean breeze gave them plenty of extra cooling to walk as much as they pleased.

Was I surprised to find so many people at the boardwalk? No. But it did make me think; why had my brain triggered the word barren in my head while a GIF of waves crashing on Jones Beach played in the background?

It was strange. But it got me there. Were the images I saw in my head made up by me? Memories of past experiences there? Or were they the images I had yet to see, but in the future was in front of me?

Maybe while I was in bed, I was already at the beach, already typing these words, and still out last night having a few too many drinks.

Or maybe I’m crazy.

I’ll let you contemplate that one.