The Slow Death of Creativity

 

Hey do you remember back when you used to look forward to the weekend?  It acted sort of like a nice big reset button that allowed you to be a functional adult (or what passes for one) and enabled you to do your job on the Monday morning didn't it ?  It seems like a lifetime ago now as well I bet.

Now its ended up as a long borring days where not much of anything gets done.  You see I am a creative person, and the shitstorm that is 2020 has affected creative people in a whole different way.  I was struggling for quite some time to understand that as a digital and traditional artist, musician, writer and song writer why I was sat doing a grand total of fuck all of any note way back since this all began back in March 2020.  I had enough supplies to do what I needed either as digital art , digital scculpture or in a traditional medium...I have a house full of numerous instruments I can play well and no shortage of gear to record any ideas down.

So why was nothing much of note coming out creatively?  It was like the creative batteries inside me had not just drained but been removed entirely.  This gave me much pause for thought to try and work out why it was happening and how to reverse it. But I'll be truthful with you, I drew an absolute blank. All my ideas and hunches turned out to be baseless and whats even worse... useless.

It took a phonecall a few days ago with my brother to enlighten me. We were having the usual sort of conversations where he told me the stuff he was doing and what was going on life wise, intersperced with lots of moaning and whinging from both himself and I about all sorts of shit.  Hey so shoot us! We are both middle aged blokes so its allowed.  

But he pointed out something that proved to be vital and explained the whole thing. In fact the more I thought about it, the deeper the rabbit hole got.  I will paraphrase what he said as I can't remember his exact words. "Creativity cannot exist in a vacuum, nor can it function well without a level of random stuff and surprises in our lives.  Without those tiny bits of random shit that happen to us all, the creative battery dries up and dies."

What is the one thing I think most of us are living in right now, regardless of if you are in a full lockdown or just living the day to day life of restrictions seen in much of the world.  We are shoved back into a routine of borring endless tedium, where there are no surprises (apart from crazy ones from politicians). Each and every single day is exactly the fucking same for the most part.

My Mondays to Fridays follow exactly the same template with very little deviation:

6.55am I wake up to my alarm...stick it on snooze for 5 mins then wake up at 7am. I make sure my wife is awake and my daughter is awake so she can get ready for school.  I have learne din my life that it seems females of the species cannot be trusted to follow simple time guidelines such as clocks lol.  Times are more sort of rough guidelines to them.

7.10am I get downstairs after getting ready and have a smoke outside the kitchen door while I make a couple of cuppas for me and my wife. 

7.30am I get washed, call my daughter to go and get washed after me.

7.55am Time for another smoke (The earlier I get up the more I smoke and the faster I smoke I find.) I also make myself a coffee and a tea for my wife.

8.05am I brush my daughters hair and ensure her packed lunch stuff is in her bag along with anything she may require at school.

8.15am My wife drives her to school

8.17am Time for another coffee and yet another smoke.

8.20-9.30am Check emails, read news on various sites. Proclaim all politicians and people in charge 'fucking idiots', my wife has learned to tune out of my morning whinging sessoins as a general rule.

9.30am I'm ready to start my work as a freelance digital 3D artist!.... But.... its 2020 so there is no work.  So I check my tutorial sales for the last 24 hours. I then procrastinate about what I should actually do so I can acheive at least one thing out of the day.

10.45am I pick up my resonator guitar and play slide blues for a few minutes until I realise I don't feel like it.  I then try to think of something in 3D I can make.... but no ideas come.  So the rest of the morning decends into watching YouTube videos while self loathing sets in due to my inanbility to 'do the thing'. 

11am -11.55am I reason that its 'not that far from lunchtime, so there's no point starting really'.  So queue another smoke or two while chatting inane bollocks to my wife abut whatever is falling out of my head at that time.  Now if I am REALLY extra specially lucky I may have one of my deep depressions just to put a fucking cherry on top of the day.  If this is the case I feel guilty offloading to anyone else, so I bottle it up and just battle ahead with my day. It slowly eating away at me a litle more every hour.

Midday: I make a sarnie for my lunch.  I am sick of sarnies.  I've grown to hate them, but they are cheap and don't take long to make. So I suffer in silence.. or it would be silence if I wasnt moaning on about some fucking shite that doesn't matter thats caught my attention on the news sites earlier.

12.30pm I end up yet again researching the latest developments in regards to COVID-19, this has sort of grown into an obsession with me. I keep hoping some clever cunt will work a way out of this, a vacine, a treatment...SOMETHING!  But they never have and the latest news on it is usually depressing.

12.31-1.30pm Cue much discussion with my wife about all the useless shite I have just read, waisting not only my time, but hers as well.  The bottom line is its no further forward than it was back in fucking March.

1.31pm My brain has the follwing conversation with itself every single fukcing day (and it drives me nuts!):

"Your daughter comes out of school at 2.40m, you know we can round that down to 2.30pm right?! BUT!...BUTBUTBUT!!!! The wife leaves at 2.20pm to pick her up in the car. So we can round that down to 2pm! So you only have 29 mins to get something done out of the day motherfucker!! BETTER HURRY YOU USELESS LAZY CUNT!"

Some days I manage to do or start something, but most days I don't as my head is empty of all creative thought.

2.45pm My daughter arrives back so cue the next few hours helping with her homework, helping make dinner etc. Of course its at this very point, the busiest point of the fucking day that my brain (in its infinite wisdom) decides its a wonderful time to have a creative thought.  So I try to either jot it down, or if its music play it between doing the household stuff.

8.30pm My daughter goes to bed and I have another smoke that takes me up to about 20 so far at this point in the day at least. I make a cup of tea (I don't drink coffee after 5pm)

8.45pm Is it Friday? If its Friday instead of going out and drinking too much and having a good time and activating the grand reset button in my head likes I used to every Friday and Saturday night, I sit and play Warcraft online. Mondays I used to play a gig at my local with a friend, but the new rules mean I don't even have that anymore. Otherwise I may play Warcraft...or just dick about watching videos or some shit until bed.

Bedtime: This is the most dangerous part of the day.   I lie there feeling guilty that I have once more managed to do a grand total of fuck all that day. My brain proclaims me useless and reminds me things could be like this for another year yet before any hope of a light at the end of the tunnel.  As I lie there in the dark, the cunting thing will not shut up! 

"We can't put up with another year of this, you'll be old grey and useless and over the hill! You may as well end it all if things are like this next October!"  

I mull this idea over as it is tempting in my darknest of moments, but I know I wont do it. 

Why?

Not because I am able to inject any common sense reasoning into things.   But because the little voice deep away in my head likes to think that if I did everyone I know would be so upset for the following 2 year after, that they'd not be able to function or even enjoy themselves. Could I do that to everyone? Of course you cant you selfish bastard! what are you thinking?! I know in actuality I am not that important in the lives of most of the people I know. Yes they may like me or even be mates with me, but after about 1-2 months after kicking the bucket they'd start to forget they ever knew me apart from a few times in the year.  After 2 years I would be a distant memory leaving little behind but my art, my words and my music.  In time even those would fade away into nothing.

So thats why I wont ever kill myself no matter how bad my depression gets or how sick of being alive I am.  Its because my subconscious is absolutely 100% convinced that all but those very closest to me would recover quite fine in a fairly short time.  In time even my wife & two kids would learn to live with me no longer being around and just 'cope'.  But to keep that logic at bay, I choose to belive the lie that none of you would be the same if I wasn't here.

So...

After reading all this, is it any wonder creatively I am dry as a bone? This doesn't touch on the fact my hands are getting worse from two and a half decades of tiny micro movements doing digital sculpting etc in 3D. But thats an article for another time.

I'm starting to belive that the phrases "When I win the lottery" and "When COVID-19 is over" are basically the same now. Just pipedreams that have only a tiny chance of happening... and thats the most depressing thing of all.

Fear and loathing of a Gambling Addiction

I used to have a serious gambling addiction. I suppose I should really say ‘I have a gambling addiction’, as addictions don’t just go away with the wave of a magic wand.  My thing was fruit machines, the insane amounts of money I threw into those things boggles my mind. 

So today was quite hard for me, as my 10 year old daughter wanted to go to the Namco arcade at the Metrocentre with myself, my wife and her mother (my ex).    Just the thought of being near a place full of fruit machines made me edgy.  But you see, the thing is since I stopped gambling many years ago I have purposely avoided being in rooms full of fruit machines.  Seeing one or two in a pub or bar isn't a problem 90% of the time.  My logic was if I didn’t go near them then I was less likely to give into temptation.

That has worked for me for many years now.  The truth of reasoning behind it is I didn't trust myself to be around that many machines.  The only exception to this was when I was in Vegas for 2 weeks at the end of 2013, and that was because the only place you could smoke was on  the casino floor.  I was proud of making it through 2 weeks in vegas and not slipping back  into my old ways once.  In fact I am still proud of it.

Today I was a mess, although to be fair this was noticeable only to me and possibly my wife and my ex.  By the time I came out about an hour or so later I was physically trembling with the effort it had taken. Crazy as it sounds within a minute or two of walking in there I could ‘feel’ every damn fruit machine’s location in the place. I could feel the draw of the flashing lights and the noise of the reels.

I realised by avoiding places like that, I had given the addiction a certain power.  It was like it was only biding its time quietly whispering “ Oh don’t get too cocky Robson! I’m patient and one day you're going to lapse.”  It’s a battle I will forever have to try to win.  So each day I wake up and say ‘today I won’t gamble’, because if I take it one day at a time then it makes it easier to manage. 

I rarely get the temptation these days. But I did on Friday night while out, I know this will sound a bit weird to some of you but bare with me here.  I had about £11 in my back pocket in pound coins for some reason (the way the change from the rounds had worked out). Now in my head pound coins do not count as ‘proper’ money. So there I was standing next to a fruit machine…. That’s when I was only seconds away from slipping a coin in. I caught myself in time of course.

So I know that will probably never leave me. I also know if I lapse, then I will not only end up flat broke nda in debit in no time, more importantly so will every single person I know that I could lend money from.  The lies would start, borrowing money from one to pay off another while managing to pocket some to feed my habit. Yeah I’ve done all that in the past. Addiction is very powerful

I remember a study done on the human brain many years ago that stuck with me.  That if you die a natural death, the last part of your brain to go out is the addiction centres of your brain.  That scares the crap out of me.

I have no idea what makes some people more liable to be addicts of one sort or another.  But I damn sure I know the effects on the addict and all around them.  I try to help those who are going through what I went through and explain how I managed it. Many have wanted help but the shame of their gambling problem keeps them from asking. 

The thing is, I know my daughter will want to go to that arcade again.  But next time I will prepare myself in advance, because not going means the addiction has a small victory, and I cannot allow that.  I can’t allow that any more than I can allow it to win by refusing to take my daughter there again.