Raising a Vein

A night finished. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I write maybe too much. You think? I read this title phrase yesterday and it caught my eye. I like it when that happens. Some phrases are so evocative that I have to stop what I'm doing and follow some little thread out to its end and give it a tug or two.

Days should be classified by the number of ideas that occur to you during them. I swear I have had some 0 idea days but not in a while. Mind you, this system doesn't distinguish between good, productive ideas and the trash that usually builds up in your (or my) head during a day. It certainly is a much nicer day when most all of the thoughts and ideas are not attacks on oneself, or thoughts about oneself.

I like it when you start with a simple goal and something grabs your interest and you're off. Chasing, digging here and there and then being pulled in different directions. Going down side paths so narrow and specific you must turn your mind sideways to fit through. Finding an idea so new to you that there is no path ahead of you and you must push aside small matters and cut through restraining beliefs to see where the thought might lead you. I never worry about getting lost on those journeys, no matter how tortuous or seemingly fruitless they may be. I will always end up back where I started, looking for something to make notes about the trip.

I don't have enough of those times any more, or maybe I do. Maybe again? Perhaps (ahhhh) this is the time for that, now that I am retired. I have the laboratory that I dreamed about as a young man. I have the time to spend in it now as well. I can think anywhere I please, as long as I'm back by four or five. It is a dream better than almost all the dreams I have while in my fitful sleeps. These dreams leave a mark. Right here we see it.

I like to have a phrase or a scene enter my head through the back door. I'm trying to focus on one thing and I hear latch softly click shut and I realize that the editor in my brain has been at work on another little project. Sometimes it's a paragraph and sometimes just a couple words pushed together. Many times it's a picture on the screen of my mind. The place where they show the movies at night. But here I am, awake and there's something showing. That screen got a lot of use when I was a kid. The theater was open at least four or five hours per day for me to watch whatever I had in mind.

I can't do that any more, not exactly. Now the old screen only works occasionally. But the more I pull it down the wall and turn on the projector, the better it works.

The little man sent me this:
As the old man reclined in his patched chair, pain flickered in different parts of his body, sometimes sharp, sometimes aching, flashing or growing from an ember to a flame and then burning out on its own. He tried to not to pay attention to the little storms, to notice them was to invite them to stay.

More later,

(Graphic is from the JPL Visions of the Future Collection, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/)