prompt: sweep, title: less a block, more a great wall in misc. flash fiction

I tend to not believe in the idea of “the muse” to get things done creatively. It’s part of the reason I don’t guard my smaller ideas, my short poems, comedy bits or one-off short stories with all that much jealousy, either. “Writers write” my father always said. If all you have is two or three good ideas you need hoard like a dragon atop piles of coin, you’re not really a writer at all, you’re just a person with two or three good ideas. If somebody steals something I wrote in a day and I can’t recover from that, that’s on me. Make more. I should’ve structured my brains to keep churning out so many new ideas that by sheer odds one or two new good ones should emerge in quantity-over-quality’s beautiful waltz. The value of a piece of writing is one thing to me, I guess, but the value of a writer’s life is not so much in two or three drops of heartbreaking genius, rather in an ability keep generating new material. I don’t burn incense for muses, I devote myself to process.

I’ve spent four decades training my mind to churn so fast I can get notions up to light-speed like the Hadron Super Collider, smash them into each other and study the minute fleeting sprays of their remixed constituent parts, I guess, to turn them into story. I’ve spent four decades training my heart into a large dumpster where I can like some fevered raccoon hoard the compost of this decaying culture, the legacy of this dying American age, every last little scrap until weight and pressure and time convert that detritus to the occasional diamond, I guess, to turn into story.

But my process requires novel input on a regular basis and that is a goddamned problem, here in the new Age of Plague. I need to go out into the world and find new junk to put weight atop the compost, new atoms to smash into prisms of the almost-imaginary. To mishear words into puns that become story seeds, to hear words misspoken that allow me to see them differently, to watch two ideas that would be presumed contradictory standing in unison and suddenly have revelation of some new simile or metaphor that becomes a little something-something worth the telling.

We don’t have that, right now. At best, we’ve folk on social media relitigating settled arguments from five years ago and if that’s the best, God help us with the worst. So I don’t have a story this week, I’m sorry, my process is utterly borked. I keep on writing, of course, that’s what my father taught me, I hold to his commission, but it’s mostly just love-poetries to women I’ll probably never get to love and rambling essays like this. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Whenever we’re able to sweep up this mess, maybe story will return as well, and I light incense in tribute to my processes for that day, indeed.