Sometimes it would
suddenly decide to sit there, on your comfortable couch—in a relaxed, casual
pose if you’re lucky, or in a permanent rock-like one if you’re the type who
attracts misfortune. Although such times add up to a far smaller portion of
your creative life than you think, the obvious way in which it shows its
unwillingness to participate makes you nervous—so much so that you can’t come
up with even a single solution to deal with it. Should you sit down, too? Or
should you remain standing (that is, if you happen to be standing at the time)
until the moment it realizes it is being rude, leading it to take either one of
the following actions: 1.) Invite you to collectively indulge in the
plumpness of your over-priced couch, or 2.) Join your lonely standing
cocktail party (minus the cocktail)? Or should you just walk out of the room?
But as you occupy yourself
with all these questions, nothing changes; it is still there. It is still sitting on your couch. You
know that the more questions you ask yourself, the longer it will be there. And
you also know that the longer anyone, or anything sits on your couch, he or she
or it will eventually get comfortable—perhaps even a little too comfortable.
It is your idea. You
thought you had managed to get it moving, but it now appears to show no
interest in movement. Instead it taunts you with its laziness, its lack of
enthusiasm, its exhaustion. It is yours, but you are losing control of it. You
remember very clearly the last time something like this happened, but you have
no memory of the many years many other forms of it had happily agreed to walk,
and even run great distances with you. It is natural to forget good things
during bad times. This is one of those bad times. All you can see is its complex
form resting on your goddamn couch, and it is dark outside. It is pretty dark
inside too because you forgot to change the light bulb that is supposed to
illuminate your tiny living room—which, by the way, is also your dining room,
your working room, and your bedroom.
Writer’s block, they
call it. But you call it The Return of the Couch Potato. Except it is not a
potato; it is your idea. Yet you somehow
lost the power to control it—at least for now. You wanted to create something
you could be proud of, but in order to do so you knew you would need a lot of energy
to absorb everything around you—touching poems, gut-wrenching guitar solos, the
tender kisses of your lover. So you did just that; you absorbed. You absorbed
and absorbed and absorbed until it—IT!—finally showed up, and you were dazzled
by its beauty. You got what you wanted. You were creating. Notes were taken,
plots outlined, and powerful paragraphs of prose slowly filled the pages
of your journal. But then, it happened.
It had had enough. It
wanted to rest. Just for a while. Or maybe for a period of time longer than “a
while.” Now that it’s on the couch, it might as well take a nap. You are a dry
sponge. You are actually pretty tired yourself but you still want to keep
going. You want to beg it to keep going with you, but you don’t because you’re
too busy asking yourself the silly questions in Paragraph One.
Whose fault is it? Were
you too harsh on it? Were you being too ambitious? You don’t know. You don’t
know what to do. You don’t know where you should dump the blame. So you drag a
chair and place it right next to your couch, and begin to write something like
this, a scented candle burning beside you…