It’s Saturday morning, and I am out of creativity for this week, so for today’s post, it’s just “whatever” stuff this morning.

I tried to be a little more creative in my writing exercises this week, and as with most of my writings, I wasn’t super thrilled with the results.

I started another short story yesterday that was a beginning without an end. Maybe because the film “The Shack” is showing up in commercials on TV, I started a story about a guy who grabs a few six packs and drives his truck out and up a mountain to his uncle’s cabin, for some troubling reason. I got a few paragraphs in and then I stopped. It a) felt like most other things I commonly write, and b) it had no ending, no goal, no objective. Which is what I find with so much creative writing I attempt. It all feels the same- all drab writing, all dreary plots, all muted depression without alleviation. I write, and I immediately feel bored with my writing- much like I feel about my life, sad to say.

My de Anza project has stalled, mostly because I keep resisting cracking open that biography to get through it. Every reading session is 4 pages read per hour, and I think it’s just caught up to me. I haven’t found a good answer for trying to keep the book open while I type notes on what I read, so every scan of a paragraph and idea transfer is an exercise in bookmarking, closing the book, trying to remember what I was wanting to write down, and then forgetting half of the thought, reopening the book, refinding where I was on the page, and repeating it all again. My reading/notetaking routine is inefficient. And if you can’t get through your source material, you probably cannot produce much of anything. I wish I was a better researcher, in all aspects of life.

I do need to finish that biography though.

I really don’t know how prolific people do it. How do they not only come up with so many different ideas they feel worth developing and conveying, but also, how do they find all of the words they need to come up with complete, coherent stories? The matter of productivity is perplexing to me. Some people seem to have an infinite capacity to create. And some of us are stuck circling around the same ideas, over and over and over.

I am sure some of my creativity problems comes from a private life that is largely flat and brackish. I don’t spend much time with many friends, and am often distant even to my family. I blame that tendency within to introversion, but also to just a selfish heart. I am largely what I hoped I’d avoid becoming- someone pretty wrapped up in me.

Which is part also explains why I never made it in ministry. Despite my experiences and insights related to the Gospel, I am still grossly just about me. The loving and serving instincts that are a product of Holy Spirit indwelling surface periodically, but rarely. I don’t think a lot about others. Which also explains why I am also single.

My sister’s sons are here in town, and I would not be surprised if they grow into young men and are strangers to me. My brother moved away with his family, and I will be a distant figure to his kids as well.

I’m just not a big people person, I guess. I love, I suppose, but I don’t put a lot in to others. I never feel like I have much to put in.

So I just float.

Oh well. I need to burn my house down and try and get insurance for it. I am a horrid bachelor housekeeper and it is gross inside and I can never get it sort of-clean, so abandoning it at times sounds very attractive.

I’m also tired of social media.

At least there is baseball.

My word for the day: “Firth”. Firth is “a regional term of Scotland used to denote various coastal waters, such as large sea bays, estuaries, inlets, and straits.” There you go, you American Scots.