It's Too Damned Early!

6:40 a.m. - I woke up over an hour ago with a million story lines rolling through my head. I wasn’t ready to wake up yet; in fact my alarm is set for 8:00. It’s Sunday morning, dammit! Oh well, time to put some coffee on and write something… we’ll see what it is just as soon as I get my caffeine.

It’s brewing… Ohhh ya! That’s good coffee!

I never really considered myself a prolific writer. Hell, until recently I never really considered myself a writer period - and on some level still don’t. Writing has always been a chore for me. I never wanted to write anything, being good at it has nothing to do with it. In some respects I still don’t, I mean let’s face it; I really wanted to be sleeping right now. But no, I have this drive, this motivation to write and I don’t even know what.

That’s a lie, I know what. I know of several “whats.” I awoke to thinking about the first chapter in my as yet unwritten book. It went on to other ideas, the “prolificness” (not a word, spell-checker is having fits) of my writing being the one I seized upon this morning. It then wandered off to things like the nature of the universe. Yup, I think about those things! So… am I a prolific writer?

No. Not yet anyway. Most of what I have is still abstract thought. There are times such as this morning where these thoughts are crystallizing, precipitating out in the form of the written word, but more often than not I’ll resist. I don’t want to like this, but I’m only fooling myself. Old habits, however, die hard – I’m not supposed to like “the arts.”

From grade school all the way through high school, math was my forte. I excelled in other “hard” sciences too. It seemed natural enough; I grew up in the Silicon Valley during the technology boom – everyone was some kind of engineer, except the kind that drove trains. My father has a PhD in chemistry – from Stanford no less. The cast was set. Combined with the fact that I had always struggled – a little bit – in English, it appeared that I was destined to follow the same path.

I never really considered any other alternative. I would, for a very long time, assume that this was the course expected of me; that I really had no encouragement or option to explore other avenues. It was a creation of my imagination. I had simply put one and one together and came up with three, math genius that I am. There were numerous other factors that I failed to consider because I had already figured it out. I knew it all. It is therefore stuck in my now much more enlightened mind that I am no good at this. English and writing are my “off” subjects. I’m not supposed to like it.

In most every respect, I have grown very fond of writing. The resistance is more background noise than anything else. It can be, however, very inconvenient. I did not want to be inspired at five o’clock this morning. I would have preferred it come at about noon – or maybe tomorrow. In reality, all I’m doing right now is stalling; I have not satisfied the curiosity that had awakened me. It was about the book – a project that I know all too well could have me planted here all freakin’ day. Today, this will have to do.