It’s Time For A Little Q & A

In the comment section of yesterday’s post, frequent commenter, superior human, and all around swell egg Heather asked me a question, the answer to which didn’t neatly fit into the comment section, so I am devoting today’s post to it instead. In case you don’t know Heather, she runs the excellent blog Creative Devolution and is one of the funniest, most creative and talented people I “know”. I put the word “know” in quotation marks because I haven’t met her, and well, this is the internet, and what with that whole Manti Te’o thing and all, you really can’t be too sure. Every time I become acquainted with a “woman” online, I get the nagging feeling that in reality I’m dealing with a 52 year old accountant with male pattern baldness and excessive back-hair, furtively jerking it to every one of my correspondences in front of a computer at a public library.

The truth is, you never really know who it is you’re dealing with online, do you? You don’t want to play the fool, and you certainly don’t want to get taken advantage of, so you put up your defenses.

Dear “Mom”,

I don’t know what kind of sick and twisted game you’re playing, but I’m not fucking falling for it. Tell my “brother” who “needs a kidney” that he’ll just have to find himself another rube.

Love,

Your “son”

So I’ve learned to become a less trusting person. So much so, in fact, that I now require up to three email correspondences before giving my social security number and bank account information to representatives of the Nigerian Royal Family. That having been said, I don’t think Heather is a front for some deviant in the Schenectady Public Library. She seems like a real live, actual female human, one who, as I mentioned, is stunningly creative. For instance, she once made a fucking tree out of burlap. No shit. If you would have asked me what burlap was good for, other than to make sacks with it, I would’ve been hard pressed to come up with anything at all, except maybe to smoke it. (A couple of high school drug purchases I remember may have qualified.) She went and made a goddamn tree out of it, and it looked awesome.

How the hell do you mentally leap from burlap to a tree? If a friend of mine walked up to me and said, “Greg, I’m getting married in a month, and for the wedding I was wondering if you could find some sort of creative use for all of these burlap bags I’ve got?” I’d stuff him into one of the sacks, throw his ass in the trunk of my car, and drive him far, far away until the wedding day had passed and he came to his goddamn senses. At no point would trees come into the picture.

Let’s see, I’ve kind of wandered here a bit. Where was I? Oh, yeah! Heather had a question!

Where ARE you and what on earth ARE YOU DOING when you think this stuff up???

Well, I’ve kind of covered this ground before, but didn’t really address where I am and what I’m doing when an idea comes to me. Although my muse can strike at any time (which is why I now always wear a cup), I have noticed there are some places that are more conducive to creative thinking than others:

So as you can see, there’s really no rhyme or reason as far as location is concerned. What I’m doing when a creative idea hits, however, is a different story:

As you can see, I’m at my most creative when performing normal, every day activities. I find this interesting. You’d think that I would be more creative when doing something novel, like being conscious at work, but apparently not.

Not that I consider my site terribly creative, mind you. It’s just blah blah blah, dick joke, blah blah blah, I used to get high, blah blah blah, anecdote about Bea Arthur’s penis… I just write what the voices in my head tell me, basically. (Although not the ones that tell me to write letters to the President. I fell for that once. Secret Service cavity searches are no fun and I got none of the proceeds from the resulting DVD.)

So Heather, I hope that answers your question, although to be honest with everyone, I doubt she has the time to read this. She’s probably busy building a life-sized replica of a Model T out of seersucker. And it will look awesome.