Autumn in New York

Autumn again. This is my fourth time experiencing this season in New York. And the first where I’m not in some form of relationship as it begins. The ennui and melancholy of quarantine ebbs and flows, I try to stay positive but I can’t help but feel stuck. My usual sort of stuck. Frustration at the inability to make anything, the frustration at being distracted, the panic of not knowing what to do next.

I had a strange experience a few weeks ago, while dreaming, fevered from strep throat, and sweating through my sheets for some 14 hours. The dream is in my dream journal in as much detail as I couldn’t recall, but suffice it to say I might have succeeded in at least one long time goal: reinitiating a pact with a personal deity. This time, he took the form of Vishnu, but he was in Japan, and wore neither something from the Vedic period, nor Japan’s Edo. Rather, he appeared to me in cargo pants and a loose fitting collarless dress shirt. Considering some other happenings both before and after this encounter, a new path is taking shape, but its edges are still vague to the point that I’m wary of moving even a single step in any direction. Maybe thats the issue.

I’ve become hyper aware of a tick of mine this week, a compulsion to hold my breath. I don’t know if it has anything to do with my chronic nausea, but I have been catching myself in certain seating positions or during certain tasks, pausing my own breathing. I think it is something to do with that same compulsion to put off movement, to put off progress. I don’t want to exist in a new moment until I am absolutely ready and prepared, or at least I tell myself. Really I don’t want to move to the new moment at all, and my thoughts rarely go to planning or preparation outside the absolute minimum. I might want to have things planned and made certain, but thats just a symptom of a deeper desire to not make mistakes—to not be seen making mistakes. If I get too overwhelmed by the inevitability of a moment passing me by, I freeze up. I hold my breath. I do it when I’m concentrating hard too, almost as if to trick my brain into believing the next moment will not come to be until I’m finished with the piece of mental work I’m doing.

I was on a mushroom trip with a friend last weekend, and had a moment of thought that made me take a note in my idea journal. Immediately after, I began contemplating the impulse to do so. I have found writing, or any creative venture, so hard in my adult years thus far. But I am always brought back or reminded of my ambition by these fleeting, rapturous moments of inspiration. What are they? What is the underlying feeling or motive, if not to tell a story? I’ve heard creative people described by a writer as people whom have a natural antenna for something greater, call it a zeitgeist, the collective unconscious, whatever you like. I’ve always felt certain I had that antenna, and the concept of having such an intuition is even within theme for many of my story ideas. However, I have always struggled to do anything other than have an idea, and think “wow I want to share this feeling with someone else” the “smell of the rain on the road at dawn” as Blake Snyder put it—A moment that your soul needs to share.