Story Heroin

This whole writing addiction never works how you expect it to, does it?
It's easy to see how the people in the olden days thought there were such things as Muses and that they were fickle and fanciful.
One minute you get a big craving to write something and the next minute you want to write something else.
I don't even seem to be able to stick to the same genre or even the same medium. Short stories, novels, scripts and articles are pouring out of me like word spew at the moment. The start of them are but then the fickle Muse moves on without finishing the story. That's where the hard work part comes in, you have to force yourself to finish these things and it's hard. It's especially hard when you have a shit job to work around.
I thought a real writer could write anywhere. I heard all those stories about Stephen King writing in the laundry room of a hospital between washing sheets covered in blood and maggots. Yes, maggots apparently, poor old Stevie.
I can't write anywhere though. I can't write at work, it seems to suck the inspiration out of me. It's like a place my Muse refuses to enter.
You have to wonder if this whole writing thing is a gift or a curse. It drives you round the twist if you can't write but society doesn't allow people to just sit and write. If one more person says the word 'productivity' to me I'm going to hit them.
Where did the obsession with being productive come from? Sounds bloody Victorian to me.
Why can't people simply be?

A Little Story

I wrote this little story to go in a magazine. They said it had to be what they call flash fiction which just means that it must be very short.

Toy Bird

The screeching of grinding metal sounded like a car crash. Wood splintered as a metal wing sliced through a bed clad in a ‘Doctor Who’ bedspread. The creature staggered and hit a wall, shaking the floor. The two little girls in the wardrobe screamed. The bird lashed out with shining silver talons and tore huge chunks out of the pink carpet.
“What is it?” Lucy screamed and gagged with the overpowering smell of static.
Glass shattered.
“It was my little metal bird,” Beth said as she clung to an armful of clothes.
“What?”
The wardrobe shook sending the already squashed girls slamming into the side.
“It was just a little bird, but it got big.”
“How could it get big?”
A crash as something big fell over and smashed.
“What was that?”
“What are we gonna do?”
Wood crunched as the wardrobe fell against the wall and the girls screamed again.
“What’s happening, girls?” A voice yelled from downstairs.
“MUM,” Lucy shouted.
“Don’t,” said Beth.
“MUM.”
The scraping of metal against metal was getting louder and painful. Static smell was giving them both roaring headaches.
“Lucy? What’s happening?”
Their mum was at the door now.
“Don’t come in here, mum,” Beth shouted at the top of her voice.
Another crash as something fell on the side of the now diagonal wardrobe.
“What are you doing?” Lucy said.
“If mum comes in here, it’ll get her.”
“Lucy, Beth, open the door. What the hell is going on?”
Fits were drumming on the door. The screeching of metal was being punctuated by a thudding and a creaking of wood.
“The wardrobe’s breaking,” Lucy said.
“What’s that terrible noise? Let me in.”
A side panel in the wardrobe suddenly bowed inwards. The clothes rail jumped out of its holdings and smacked Beth across the side of the head, she whimpered.
“MUM,” bellowed Lucy.
“Lucy, Lucy, the door’s stuck. I’m going to try and break it down,” but the last words were lost in a roar of grating metal. Wood cracked as a flash of metal burst through the wardrobe door.
Beth grabbed the clothes rail as a shining silver wing slashed through the wardrobe door and opened a glaring red wound across Lucy’s chest. She clutched her chest, tears in her eyes and looked up at Beth.
With a thud the bedroom door burst open. Beth lunged forward through the wrecked wardrobe door and drove the clothes rail as hard as she could into the creature’s eye.
Their mum saw something very large and shiny with whirring eyes, a hooked beak and shining steel feathers before it vanished. Beth saw the bird shrink to its original size in a fraction of a second before she grabbed it with trembling hands and flung it through the broken window.

Irish Wabi Sabi

Here's a strange thing. I watched that show about wabi sabi and afterwards I went onto Ryan Air's website to see how much flights to Ireland would be and ordered a book by Roddy Doyle on Amazon.
What was it about wabi sabi that gave me an urge to be in Ireland or to think about Ireland?
I suppose Roddy Doyle is the master of capturing something wonderful in the lives of working class Irish people without falling into Dickensian sentimentality.
It also sort of makes sense in the way that I feel a lot closer to my Irish family than my English family, even though I don't see them often.
None of this really explains what made me suddenly associate wabi sabi with Ireland. I know that something strange happened when the Football World Cup was held in Japan. I was in Ireland at the time so obviously the event was covered from an Irish point of view and it was very interesting to see how well the Irish and the Japanese got on. The uber-polite formality of the Japanese initially seemed at odds with the ramshackle warmth of the Irish. However, a love of simple innocent pleasures like singing songs, dancing and drinking in good company is shared by both peoples and meant that they got on swimmingly. My uncle told me some great stories that he'd heard on the TV - he said that a load of Irish had gone into a bar full of uptight Japanese businessmen and by the end of the night one of the businessmen had got up on a table and sung 'Molly Malone' in perfect English. There was also an incident of a group of Ireland supporters going into a seemingly stuffy Japanese restaurant but not being let out of the place until they sung a song for the locals.
I don't know why, but these sorts of stories make me proud to be even half Irish.
Sitting here watching the Commitments, and having read the original Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle, I realise how wrong Marcel Theroux got it when he saw a rickety little cottage in the countryside to be the epitome of wabi sabi. He would have really benefited from a glimpse at an Irish wabi sabi where you can see beauty in the way people live in tower blocks, having illegitimate babies and running chipper vans. Roddy Doyle saw it. He saw that wabi sabi was about living your life in the best way you can given the circumstances and not worrying about a load of superficial bollocks.
The director of the film The Commitments (can't remember his name), which differs massively from the book, realised it too. He saw the magic in a wonderful moment on stage even if it does go a load of nowhere.
These people saw the beauty of a fleeting moment that would never happen again and the context didn't matter. They knew that it wasn't just some poxy pastoral dream but about togetherness in a great moment that doesn't require a stunning setting or even a spiritual awareness. Really wabi sabi and particularly an Irish wabi sabi is about a simple beautiful passing moment regardless of context or what circumstances created that moment.
As I always say we skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor, I was feeling kinda sea sick, but the crowd called out for more
That's very profound Jimmy, what does it mean
I'm fucked if I know, Terry.

The Dark Side of Wabi Sabi

I just watched that show where Marcel Theroux (however you spell his name) went to Japan to find out about Wabi Sabi. Even at the end of the show I got the distinct feeling that he still didn't get it and that he'd never get it. It reminded me a lot of the time I tried to explain Aestheticism to a boy who had taken the module because he didn't know what else to take. The boy didn't get it and after four hours and many cup of coffee of me explaining it to him, he still didn't get it.
Put in the simplest terms, I think both wabi sabi and Aestheticism are concepts you have to feel rather than know on an intellectual level.
This made me think about the connections between the two artist principles. At a glance they seem to be almost polar opposites. Wabi sabi is all about simplicity, usefulness and imperfection whereas Aestheticism is all about uselessness, artifice and an attempt at perfection.
However, I couldn't help but make the comparison. They both seem to be artist movements which have bled over to become a way of life.
At the heart of both there is a maxim of living in the moment and disinterestedness.
I was reminded of Plato's Symposium where he talks about beauty and seeing beauty in common things to reach a kind of state of beauty nirvana that he couldn't describe.
Compared to the context of austere zen Buddhism and the discipline of tea ceremonies, the setting of the Symposium in a kind of party populated to by drunk beautiful young men seems to make the Western concept jaded from the start.
Saying that, something Marcel actually managed to spot was the love of artifice and hedonism of modern Japan. So it looks like both these movements have a similar flaw and it lies in the heart of existentialism. To the zen monks this means that you have to live each moment striving for some kind of sublime purity but to the average person it means bugger everything and enjoy every moment in whatever way you feel is best.
A similar phenomenon occurs in aestheticism where the urge to experience as much of beautiful life as possible becomes increasingly extreme until it leads to all kinds of debauchery (a wonderful word if you ask me) and crazy goings on.