me good writer, fo realz

Morning mes amis, I hope you are all well-bundled up and did not go outside with wet hair. The rats in the subway were wearing little fleece hoodies today, it’s so mothereffing cold.

Yesterday I started two new books, in the tub naturally, with a cup of tea instead of my usual vodka rocks because I am singing for Sue’s birthday party on Tuesday and do not wish to sound like Michigan J. Frog. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_J._Frog

They are: The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives (see I am TOO taking this NYE self-improvement dealio seriously).

Don’t Think of An Elephant! is essentially the progressive’s cheat sheet for understanding, and ostensibly defeating, the conservative right. Progressive Democrats have two major Achilles’ heels – splintering (i.e. working primarily for the advancement of their own subcategory; socioeconomic vs. environmental vs. anticapitalist progressives instead of uniting towards a common goal as conservatives do) and sorely underestimating their political counterparts. We tend to get on our high horses about conservatives and dismiss them as stupid, at our peril. Conservative groups have poured hundreds of millions of dollars and man-hours into assembling think tanks devoted exclusively to the study of language and how to use it effectively to spread their message. They are also masters at the use of “strategic initiatives,” a phrase I’ve heard smacked about for years but never actually knew what it meant until I read this book. In a nutshell it means to introduce and champion a particular political wedge issue for the purpose of promoting ambitious, long-term policy agendas. For example, in the last few years the issue of tort reform has been pretty front-and-center (improving U.S. litigation efficiency) The stated objective of tort reform is to eliminate frivolous lawsuits, which sells with the American public. Why should Henrietta Housewife (and by extension, Arthur Attorney) get thirty million dollars from McDonald’s because she was too dumb to realize that coffee is hot? All well and good, except that the actual objective of tort reform, from the conservative right’s perspective, is to eventually eliminate the public’s ability to sue corporations that cause them real harm in the course of doing business, which makes it even more profitable for those corporations to continue doing bigger and more harmful business. Same deal with the partial-birth abortion debate (actual objective: reverse Roe vs. Wade). These issues are packaged and sold to us for the exclusive purpose of divisiveness and progressive defensiveness. Pretty sneaky shit. And I’m only on chapter two.

The Artist’s Way, as you might guess from the title, is a little more gentle and New-Agey and a lot less depressing. It is a twelve-week intensive writing course that seeks to reunite the reader with his or her inner artist. My inner artist has been on vacation in Bora Bora for quite some time, swimming with the dolphins or blithely eating poisonous berries or whatever it does, and has forgotten what it’s here for, so I’m playing bounty hunter and rounding it up. One of the exercises in the book has to do with affirmations and blurts. The idea is that if you write enough positive affirmations about yourself and your creative ability, eventually a hideous little Censor blurt will make its way to the surface and basically tell you that you suck and are completely full of it and aren’t fit to scrawl lewd graffiti on a subway poster of Heidi Klum, let alone create great art. Or something like that.

After my tubbing I tried writing a few affirmations, with mixed results. The whole idea of affirmations is very hokey and Stuart Smalley-esque to me (although I love that movie). Even while I was writing, “I am creative, I am talented, I have a gift,” all I kept thinking was, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” While all of that may be true, it means doodly when it comes to writing. Maybe I’m good enough, smart enough, liked tons and am really a shitty writer. Maybe I’m lazy and prefer drinking and watching old movies on AMC, or drinking and taking long baths, or drinking and hanging out with my friends, or drinking and converting oxygen into carbon dioxide to writing (true, true, true, and sadly, true). Maybe I’m actually a GREAT writer, and will never realize my full potential because of this stupid blurting that’s taken up an entire page. What happened to the affirmations? This is what I was thinking last night as I stared at all this manipulative, Machiavellian, destructive, CONSERVATIVE yuck that ate up my progressive, positive thinking like kudzu.

So I set the page on fire. It was most liberating (if you smelled something funny last night Charles, that’s what it was. Sorry!). And I resolved to do it again and again, until I didn’t have any more blurts left in me, the course was completed and I had my inner artist producing again. If only we could do the same thing to Rush and Ann and Dubya and Rudy and O’Lielly.

It is January 3^rd, 2008 and I haven’t written 07 once on any piece of correspondence yet. Good fucking riddance. I can’t WAIT to see what the Jumbo Remote crew has in store this year.

Much love and toasty warm alpaca kisses to all of ya,

Jamie