What the @#$% was I thinking?!

Funny, isn't it, how ideas, early on a clear and sunny morning, or late in evening, and especially after reading some particularly stirring author---Voltaire, Twain, Tom Robbins, etc---can be so powerful, so seemingly revolutionary. You get this idea for a story or an essay---or a widget, or maybe a Falling Water House, a pyramid scheme, a new form of government (well, in truth, I guess the last two are, after all is said and done, one and the same thing)---and you let your mind run with it. You scribble, you write, you open up a new Excel program and start running the numbers, or your AutoCad and start snapping lines, or you dig out that dusty old copy of something-or-other by Will Durant, to see if Solon really did exist. And the time slips away between your fingers magically as they tap out a steady but stumbling cadence for hours on end.

I've come to realize that this---this psycho-physical act of writing, when one is deep "in the zone"--- is that much ballyhooed Flow. And moreover, heaping revelation upon enlightenment, that this Flow, at times, is essentially that same experience that my Assembly of God forbears deemed the ultimate experience: speaking-in-tongues. It's that intoxicatingly delicious feeling of creation, during those rare moments when the conduit between the heart and the mind and the fingertips becomes a singularity; when all those twists and turns and potholes and leaps of faith and gauntlets of indecision and self-ridicule that line that impossibly long and tortuous path which any given idea must pass in order to take on a life of its own beyond its creator's fingertips---when, like a wormhole in the folds of time, they all disappear, the conduit truncates infinitesimally, allowing ones mind to gallop unhackneyed through the fields and streams of ideas, emotions, calculation, creations; between the heaven of ones mind and the earth just beyond the fingertip.

.......and then.....

.....a few days go by, maybe a few months or a year or two, and you find those scrawlings buried amongst a stack of papers. Your heart leaps as you suddenly feel that Flow again, its palpable echo still reverberating around the infinite universe of your memory, like a photon ricocheting around the mirrored walls of the inside of your cranium; and even before you ever finish the first sentence you think: Genius!

But, alas, you read on....and on....and on....and you look out the window again, remembering the original inspiration; you rub your chin, you read that one sort-of-off-balance thought again; you make a note in the margin and strike through a word or two. Strange, you think, as that all-too familiar "sinking feeling" begins slowly pulling back down into the depths of, well, not-genius. You read it again...and again...and again. And you suddenly realize: it's gone! Where is the Flow?

You sit back in your chair and consider the delete button, realizing that you have, once again, written shit. And you wonder: what the FUCK was I thinking?!

Marrs