In search of the Quirk

Seeking a niche among the great minds of creativity, my research brought me to an assessment of my own creative process.

What makes this little clock tock?

What are the mysterious machinations of such an imaginative mind?  Oh, how to encapsulate the processes by which the mundane is made pithy?  (Spoiler Alert:  You’ve got to have a ration of mundane, for one thing.  Then just add a pinch of pith.)


Or, more directly to the point, as my husband puts it:  What are you doing all day?!

Ahem.  Let me just say that writing all this stuff takes a certain kind of person. 

And that sort of person may do particular things as a part of her writing life.  In fact, she might even do some of those things ritualistically.  So what?  Is there a problem with that?

What sorts of ceremonies might such a writer conduct?  Oh and wouldn’t you like to know! 

In fact, a guy named Mason Currey did want to know.  Not about me.  He’s never heard of me in spite of all the trouble I’ve gone to. 

My adorable, if overlooked, eccentricity notwithstanding, I commend him for his expedition into the realm of the persistent writer.  He collected working profiles of some of the creative greats and their weird little habits in his book Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work: How Artists Work.

First thing you’re going to notice – some of these guys are pretty whacky. 

For example, according to Currey, Igor Stravinsky stood on his head to clear his brain.  I guess it worked but his hats fit funny.

Beethoven counted out exactly 60 coffee beans for his morning cup before he sat down to compose.  Now that seems just plain goofy.  But Ludwig himself?  Not goofy at all!  In fact, if you look at his portraits he wears a perpetual frown, perhaps brought on by the bean counting.

Here’s a good one:  Benjamin Franklin started his day with an "air bath." I think that means he sat around naked.  You’ve got to love Ben!  Though somewhere I read he also had monumental scalp itch.  Dandruff.  That and an air bath.  No wonder he lived alone.


But even fully clothed, if sweats and a rally cap qualify, this writer works a cappella.  Unless you count Sports Radio.  Yep.  Just me, my worry beads, Marty Lurie and my blankie.  Sigh.

Jean Paul Sartre ingested ten times the recommended daily dose of amphetamine.  I guess they recommended amphetamine back then.  He did get a lot done.  

As much as I want to secure my niche, it looks like I’m going to have to cultivate some more interesting eccentricities. 

As it is, sneaking up on the computer is the best I have to offer, and everyone does that. 

What?  You just walk right up to yours?  In full sight?  And it lets you? 


Wow.  Maybe I am quirky.

XXX - Read me!

Pornographers have dreams too.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that so many pornographers visit my blog sites.

They’re reading my blogs about dreams; learning dreams’ language of metaphor and self-reflection.  They contemplate my advice and apply it when establishing loving relationships; I help them find common ground in the workplace…

Yeah, I don’t think that’s it.

But there they are!  Month after month.  How do these sleaze balls find me?  Why do they keep coming back?  What words do I use that would trigger a porn site’s browser? 

I haven’t said “titillating” in forever.  And let’s be honest, those guys aren’t into teasing.  They aren’t coy.  Subtlety is not their domain.

Of course dreams are not subtle either.  They expose the truth.  Hey…  Maybe that’s it!  “Exposure.”
Ugh.

And besides, in dreams, exposure is a concept, not a brick in the face, so to speak.  Or a close-up of any other kind.

Double ugh.

I’m told if a person is trying to boost her readership online, she needs to analyze the data.  I’m trying, but my delicate constitution demurs.

All right, here goes:  I have said “hot,” and “mother,” but never in the same sentence and only in response to a dream submitted by a frantic guy who dreamed he left his wife in the desert and danced away with his mom.

OK.  I made that up.  Just now, not in the dream column.  I did it here for you.  To make a point.

Google AdSense reports to me with daily updates about my legions of readers.  They track “hits” on my pages and categorize them for my edification.

And I went to school and everything, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what it means or how to make use of it.

For example, here’s another puzzle:  The Czech Republic reads me.  Romania.  Sweden and Poland account for more than 10,000 hits! 

Indians, Indonesians, Portuguese, Germans.

I’ve always loved the Kazakhstanis.  It must come through in my writing.

I get a bunch of readers in Russia.  Now I do have a couple of friends in Russia, but not 637.  Maybe word of mouth? 

Maybe I’m a phenomenon in Leningrad!?  A superstar in the Ukraine.  They can’t wait for my 2014 “Dreams around the World” tour. 

I could be a regular Rodriguez…you know, that guy in Detroit living in obscure poverty while the albums he made as a young man unbeknownst to him sold millions and millions in South Africa. 

That could be me – wildly popular and praised in Eastern Europe for my poetic voice, my facility with language, my depth of insight into the human heart.  And here am I, plodding along in ignorance, in my perfectly humble way.  Of course.

A couple of months ago I had a big surge in readership.  More than 3500 hits on this column alone. 
I can tell you which browsers routed the greatest number of readers to me.  I can tell you the time of day they read and the posts they liked the best.  I just can’t tell you what I did that month that was different from any other month.

I was my normal charming self.  Witty.  Relatable.  Wise.

Supposedly, I can learn from all these numbers and double my money!  Why, if I can get a handle on this stuff, I might be able to boost my writer’s income into the double digits!

My creeping fear is that all this AdSense rigmarole means nothing. 

That’s probably it.  My readers aren’t what they seem to be.  They’re probably not readers at all, but machines combing the clouds, randomly hitting my websites knowing that I will see their links in AdSense and click on them, thereby giving them another hit so their sponsoring porno kingpins will pay them more. 

Hooray.  Always happy to be helpful.

I have to face the probability that my while the search engines may love me, it’s likely four of my friends in California and six of my cousins in Oklahoma who constitute living breathing human beings reading those blogs.  God love ‘em.


And you!  Of course you, Dear Reader.  You’re the best by the way.  Thanks.

Quest for the Quirk

Seeking a niche among the great minds of creativity, my research brought me to an assessment of my own creative process.

What makes this little clock tock.  How do I do it?


Even more fundamental:  What is it that I do?  What are the mysterious machinations of such an imaginative mind?  Oh, how to encapsulate the processes by which the mundane is made pithy?  (You've got to have a ration of mundane, for one thing.  Then just add a pinch of pith.)

Or, more directly to the point, as my husband puts it:  What are you doing all day?!

Ahem.  Let me just say that writing all this stuff takes a certain kind of person. 

And that sort of person may do particular things as a part of her writing life.  In fact, she might even do some of those things ritualistically.  So what?  Is there a problem with that?

What sorts of ceremonies might such a writer conduct?  Oh and wouldn't you like to know! 

In fact, a guy named Mason Currey did want to know.  Not about me.  He’s never heard of me in spite of all the trouble I've gone to. 

My adorable, if overlooked, eccentricity notwithstanding, I commend him for his expedition into the realm of the persistent writer.  He collected working profiles of some of the creative greats and their weird little habits in his book Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work: How Artists Work.

First thing you’re going to notice – some of these guys are pretty whacky. 

For example, according to Currey, Igor Stravinsky stood on his head to clear his brain.  I guess it worked but his hats fit funny.

Beethoven counted out exactly 60 coffee beans for his morning cup before he sat down to compose.  Now that seems just plain goofy.  But Ludwig himself?  Not goofy at all!  In fact, if you look at his portraits he wears a perpetual frown, perhaps brought on by the bean counting.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet W. H. Auden believed that a life of "military precision was essential to his creativity," and so this meant constantly checking his watch. "Eating, drinking, writing, shopping, crossword puzzles, even the mailman’s arrival— all are timed to the minute and with accompanying routines."  Today we call that Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Auden even wrote about his practices: 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone…

Seriously.  He wrote that.  Poets!  What’re you going to do?

I’ll just clear up any misconceptions right now:  I might have a twist or two, but I’m not W.H. Auden.  Although I will admit to having a bunch of old wind-up chiming clocks that need frequent cajoling, so maybe I am checking them all the time.  But it’s not the same. 

On the other hand, perhaps I should take my neighbor’s dog a juicy bone as he hasn't quit barking since Arbor Day.  I’ll just wedge it between his molars.

Here’s a good one:  Benjamin Franklin started his day with an "air bath." I think that means he sat around naked.  You've got to love Ben!  Though somewhere I read he also had monumental scalp itch.  Dandruff.  That and an air bath.  No wonder he lived alone.

But even fully clothed, if sweats and a rally cap qualify, this writer works a Capella.  Unless you count Sports Radio.  Yep.  Just me, my worry beads, Marty Lurie and my blankie.  Sigh.

Jean Paul Sartre ingested ten times the recommended daily dose of amphetamine.  I guess they recommended amphetamine back then.  He did get a lot done.  

As much as I want to secure my niche, it looks like I’m going to have to cultivate some more interesting eccentricities. 

As it is, sneaking up on the computer is the best I have to offer, and everyone does that. 

What?  You just walk right up to yours?  In full sight?  And it lets you? 


Wow.  Maybe I am quirky.

Mr. Moodgeist and the commute of the future

Ever vigilant in my quest for cutting edge technology to make your life safer, happier, more pleasant, I bring you the wave of the future:  Ladies and Gentlemen; Moodgeisting!

That’s right, Moodgeisting! – The latest and greatest creep into your private moments.  An ostensibly altruistic attempt at control.

Now, picture yourself on the freeway in your Toyota.  (We all drive Toyotas now, don’t we?) 

And this morning, you’re feeling a little bit crabby.  Say the dog drooled on your croissant and your pants leg and your file folder with today’s presentation.  Say you jammed your toe on the sprinkler head just before it spurted into motion dousing the fresh pants you changed into.
 
Your good humor is threadbare and you have strapped yourself into a one-ton fuel-efficient marvel of a mechanized stress-venting machine.

So you head onto the freeway to find that gusty winds have fellow commuters swingin’ and swayin’ their way into the city.  Oh boy.  This is going to be fun.

By the way, research indicates that a driver in a bad mood is more likely to have an accident than a gleeful goofball with kids on the honor roll and a new pair of shoes who’s zipping in and out of traffic while singing along with Bob Marley.

And I don’t know about you, but when my sunshiny self is overcast by an eventful morning, I’ve been known to grip the steering wheel with a tad more zeal.  Or grit my veneers just so.  These telltale indicators should prompt me to reassess my determination to get ahead of this jerk in the Escalade.  But sometimes I lose track of my higher self.

Not to worry!  Toyota has anticipated this very situation.  Toyota has Moodgeisting!  That’s right.  They’ve included mood-reading technologies “in-cabin” to provide drivers like you and me with mood metrics and calming advice.

What mood-reading technologies, you might ask.   Why, facial recognition, for one.  And we’re not talking about the kind of facial recognition where your car greets you like Bat Man, fires up on 12 cylinders and purrs down the expressway inspiring awe in those around you.  Though it might do that if you’d only cheer up. 

No.  We’re talking about in-cabin facial recognition technology that scans your face looking for frownies.  Frownies are bad for you; frownies could cause accidents. 

Yes, your invisible Moodgeisting buddy employs a range of biometric indices of your disposition comprised of analysis of your voice, sweat, pupil dilation and grip, among others.

Like Santa Claus, Mr. Moodgeist knows if you’re being bad or good.  He knows that happy motorists speak in sweet voices and rest dry palms on the wheel.  You just can’t fake sweet and dry, now can you? 

Yes, Mr. Moodgeist, for your own safety you understand, can sense when you’re on the verge of spontaneous combustion.  And as a first line of response, he gives you the readouts of your escalating biometrics, so you can bring yourself back into line. 

You can look at the rising thermometer next to “pulse,” for example, and say to yourself, “My oh my!  I must breathe deeply to drop my heart rate and alleviate my agitation.  Driving under stress is unsafe, according to research.”

“I’ll just chant my mantra and coax my sweat glands into submission.  Mellow!  Mellow!”

And here’s the greatest thing:  If you can’t talk yourself down from the carpool lane crazies; if your pupils remain dilated; if you continue to wrench the steering wheel on its post and sweat through your work shirt, Mr. Moodgeist will take over and speak to you in soothing tones with calming advice.

I imagine he’ll say something like, “Slow down!  Slow down!  You’re going to kill yourself!”  Or, “Think of your children!  They need you!”  Or, “For God’s sake, brake!  Brake!  Steer INTO a skid!” 

Hahaha!  Just kidding.  I’m sure Mr. Moodgeist is programmed with just the right balance of logic and psychology to calmly tap into the Stepford stem of your brain, ensuring that you will reduce your speed, graciously permit others into your lane, and courteously pull over so others can pass.

Just surrender, Dear Reader.  Just give in. 


Mr. Moodgeist knows best.  You can trust him in these matters.  Relax.