My view the last two weeks.
You go away with the stated intention of getting “recharged” and that’s just what you do. You get recharged. Recharging involves UNcharging in many ways, unplugging and finding a place off the grid so that all you do is read (and read and read – a bunch of my reviews of stuff I read is over at Goodreads) and talk (remember talking?) and converse and your immediate decisions involve opening another beer or swimming or both. This is the beauty of a vacation where the greatest ambition is the freedom from ambition, where you don’t feel the need to do anything because doing nothing is the entire point.
Your lives are such that you need recharging. And then you turn your vacation into another version of your regular life. You overplan, you overwork. You suck at doing nothing. Your greatest desire is to do nothing and then you find out you suck at it. To the point that you go away and return home and you feel like you need a vacation. This is idiocy. I used to be an idiot.
I have stopped this. Amazingly enough. I understood the key to a really successful recharge was to aim low and then try and go lower. Touring Italy? Not if I want to relax. Barhopping in Barcelona? I’m trying to relax. There is touring (and touring is great, a mind expanding activity full of enrichment and hangovers and great photographs), there is travel (which is, essentially, about discovery) and then there is vacation. We confuse the words. It always comes down to words. (We have rented a “camp” in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom – NEK! – the last two years; the NEK, where the food runs the gamet from beige to brown – except for the cheese – and back again but it sure is tasty).
Speaking of words: My only regret now, honestly, is that the one idea I had last year on my vacation remains in my head, still, on paper (ok, that’s a very old-fashioned notion, it’s not “on paper” it’s a file in my computer, silly…) only as the sketchiest of sketches, and I need to get going on it before it becomes lost or pushed aside by another idea (very possible). What’s the idea?
It’s like Fargo, but in northern Vermont, involving moose, a live bait shop, internet porn and cocaine. (And, woah, did you know they’re planning a TV show of Fargo! Is this even a good idea? Wasn’t that movie kind of perfect?) What I really need to do, I think, is get to know some movie people. But then again, everyone wants to get to know movie people. Don’t they? Don’t you? (And are you like me and you have that idea, plus two other movie ideas, PLUS ideas for not one but two! TV shows, one of them so involved you have plotted out the entire three to five year story arc? You’re not like me? Lucky you. Oh, and if you are the kind of person with the patience to deal with someone like me AND are either a movie/TV person or connected to one, drop me a line…)
So the dilemma becomes, what do I do first? I’m into another novel and the thing has momentum – I’ve even plotted the thing out, the thing has a roadmap, which is not normally how I work, and I’ll stick to that roadmap until the writing throws me off, because that’s what writing does, it is a deliberate Search for Surprise, but I have a roadmap. Why do I keep italicizing roadmap? It’s a roadmap. I created a ROADMAP…
I need priorities.
How off the grid was I? I returned home and the only news that really surprised me was: the Miami Heat signed Greg Oden? I don’t even like basketball!
My brain is mush. I kinda like it that way. So if you see me, be kind. No riddles.
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