The southeast has been struck this week by a gasoline shortage. I was among the droves of consumers queuing up on Monday for my turn at the gas pump.
There seems to be a lot of that going around: gas shortage, chicken wing shortage, bacon shortage, and even a sauce shortage, of which ketchup packets have been the first casualty. I keep track of shortages for my dystopian research.
But I don’t panic. I don’t succumb to anxiety. I act.
When we purchased our property, the former owners left a lot of random yard junk. Scrap wood, sheets of roofing tin, bent T-posts and cattle panels, and rolls of rusted barbed wire. All kinds of useful stuff. Over the years, we’ve used a lot of it in projects around the homestead, and added our own random junk to the piles. When I envision a new project, I can usually gather most of the materials for it from things we already have. And when I go picking through the junk, I almost always find something I didn’t even know I had, which sparks an idea for a new project or a way to improve the current one.
You’ve probably heard, at some point or another, an analogy of the mind as an attic. An attic full of all kinds of stuff that you’ll probably never use again—keepsakes, ornaments, broken furniture, moth-eaten clothes, books with the covers torn and the pages falling out. And this dusty collection of disused items is supposed to represent your mind, with its hazy memories and well-worn habits and outdated conceptions.
Sometimes the analogy goes on to criticize the way you maintain your mental attic: do you have everything strewn about in heaps and piles, covered in cobwebs and mouse droppings? Or are the items neatly organized on shelves and in cabinets? When you go up there to fetch something, do you know immediately where to look, or does a trip into the attic consume your entire day as you trawl through boxes of jumbled bric-a-brac?
This is not my favorite analogy. It doesn’t work for me on several levels. For one thing, an attic is a dark, closed-off space, while a mind is—or ought to be—open and bright. The attic is the place where household members put the stuff they don’t want or intend to use, while a mind contains many things that get put to use on a daily basis, in addition to those less utilitarian artifacts, which may be treasures or burdens, depending. Furthermore, no one spends a lot of time in their attic. (If they do, they’re probably either mistreated orphans or serial killers.) Whereas a mind should be a comfortable, welcoming environment for daily habitation.
I prefer the random yard junk analogy. Just as my yard is a treasure trove of materials waiting to be turned into raised beds, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, and other life-sustaining structures, my mind is a scrap heap of partial ideas and inspirations that can be put together in a myriad of ways to create something new.
My yard is open to the sunlight, the wind, and the rain. My mind is open to all kinds of new inputs and perspectives. Every book and essay I read, every movie I watch, every conversation I overhear, all of my good and bad memories, produces scrap for the pile of future creations.
I go into my yard to relax, to enjoy, and to build, and the same is true of my mind. It’s not neatly organized. I don’t file away its contents in columns and rows. It’s a little messy, but it’s comfortable and it’s interesting.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the old mental scrap heap this week, building and rebuilding the creation known as Chapter 2 of Technate 2051. This time has not all been spent actually writing. Most of it has been spent just being there, pondering, considering this or that partial idea; holding it up against this or that memory, seeing if the pieces fit together in the right way.
I’m getting there.
I like to envision my stories as scrap pile masterpieces. Something like the castle of Howl’s Moving Castle: a bunch of random bits and pieces cobbled into something with its own personality. Scuttling across the waste. Held together by magic.
The chapter will be up some time this weekend, shortages be damned.
Thank you for reading!
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In case you’re new around here, I’m writing a dystopian novel and publishing it one chapter a week via this newsletter. Chapter 1 of Technate 2051 was released last Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber and you missed it in your inbox, check to see if my emails are getting filtered into your spam or promotions folders.
I’ll see you back here this weekend for Chapter 2 of the novel!
-Starr
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