Inspiration

Although I got back before the weekend I feel like it is my first day back home. I've tried to construct an equation explaining how long it takes me to feel like I am home. For a while I thought it was proportional to the time spent away. I never could come up with the numbers that worked. Like most of my attempts at scientific evaluations of my life the rules don't seem to be universal. Perhaps that is the difference between art and science. Scientific experiments can be recreated with the same results every time, while art seems to be accidental at best. Hardly any moment is artistically the same every time.

When I was working at the Amphitheater at Six Flags in high school I would record the humidity and the temperature at every show and compare that to the reaction and enthusiasm of the audience. I told my producer/mentor Mr.Meeker what I was doing, and even showed him the beginning of the chart. He said, "If you can come up with that formula you will make a fortune." Just when I thought I had an algorithm and a chart with a perfect bell curve, the next audience would ruin the results. Needless to say it was not my path to fortune.

So, on my first day back I am looking for inspiration and have come to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on the corner, assuming the muse might be hiding in an ice blended mocha. Although I am critical of the writers I see here writing in public; with my iPad in tow I have joined their "wifi" ranks. However, I immediately wonder what is so inspiring here? Between the sound of the coffee steamer hissing, the blender grinding, the musak blaring and the snippets of random conversations from everyone talking on a cell phone, it is like trying to swim in a sandbox. I now realize my mistake, you "go somewhere" for inspiration or you "go somewhere" to write,they are not the same trip.

I need to put down the iPad look around, observer, remember and analyze. Then after I have come to some sort conclusion based on this inspiration, I go to a quiet, boring uninteresting place to write.

This of course bolsters my opinion that everyone trying to write in here is indeed just a poser. That or it is my ADD and I can not concentrate long enough to filter out the distractions like the real writers can do. Or perhaps real writers think of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf as a boring place and not inspirational at all.

Well, that does it, this is certainly not the place for me and I don't belong to is group. "My god Jim I'm an artist not a scientist". (are references to Star Trek - the first generation even relative in 2011?) See what this environment is doing to me.

I'm out of here.

But what will I write about today?

As you were,

Jay