nadya tumbles (on tumblr).

I’ve been having a lot of guarded realizations lately. I say they’re guarded because they’re mini epiphanies I’m not comfortable publicly divulging. I think they may be guarded even by and from me. No matter how much I claw into the pulp of the illuminating matter, it’s never enough. I’m withholding even from myself. Maybe it’s just my subconscious saying to let the process unfold, sometimes these things are meant to marinate and slowly crack open to allow the good stuff to slowly ooze to the surface rather than catapult headfirst into. Maybe the images and introspections that I have with regard to where the hell I’m going (a thousand directions at the moment) in my career, dating life…within myself…are meant to move ahead like old school movie slides.

I want to be able to pull off my head, throw it onto the carpeted floor of my office, and watch the floor switch from amorphous brown to newly waxed white oak, filing cabinets, nearly defunct computers, and strained HP printers to turn into shelves holding bowling shoes, flat screens hosting scores of games, and printers to be...well, I don’t know. 

None of this makes sense.  

Basically I want my office to turn into a bowling alley upon dropping my head to the floor, and for my head to be a bowling ball. I’m the only one keeping score as my head coasts down the gutter, it coasts down the gutter because it needs to come full circle without hitting anything, it’s a head that embraces failure as its sense of organization. 

I’m in a game of consciousness but it can’t stream without first falling apart. 

So I guess I’ll let my bowling ball head knock over a few pins.

I think for writers there comes a point of break and no return. I decided to say point of break rather than just breaking point because there’s something pointier about “point of break”—like the break is so piercing it has a literal point. Anyway...

We writers often exist in a perfectionist world of chaos. Does that make sense? It’s not supposed to. For me, this world of chaos is comprised of certain memories that are so lucid that throughout their replays I begin to wonder if I’m back in them again. Or worse, what if they never happened at all?  Then, there’s the characters. Oh my god—there are countless. Most I’ve never churned out into a reality, but it’ll happen. Then again that’s what many of us writers say. And there goes that perfectionist problem. All these images, ideas, words, unspoken dialogue it’s so readily available for fleshing out that the pure accessibility of it overwhelms and frustrates. Why can’t these ideas be organized systematically, to better place onto the page? When will that Organization Queen just get to work and stop bitching at me to get my shit together and write already!

Now, this perfectionist chaos relates mostly to my creative work.  In terms of my journalistic pursuits, stuff flows pretty seamlessly. This in part may relate to the fact that there’s more of a plan involved for a piece of journalism. The plans often catapult towards me in full orderly force.  I’ll find an event of a writer whom I like. Perfect—I’m there. Or, I’ll be offered to cover something or interview someone. When I hear of a horrific yet under-covered news story, like the bombing in Yola Nigeria a few months back, I cover it in depth because no one else is. Well, maybe you’re a journalist and not a creative writer, you may think. Nah, I definitely have ability to do both, I just think I’m more protective of my own ideas and their possible escape.

Poetry mostly, comes with ease.

My kitchen table is sitting over a carpet with a few caked in pieces of Trader Joe’s Reduced Fat Multigrain pita chips, a bobby pin (hair clip?), and three CVS receipts the length of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

My carpet is sitting over a floor that must be wood because I’ve seen other apartments with the wood floors--waxed--but mine has invariably been marinating for many moons under the now stained and chip flecked carpet.

Under the wood floor, I guess, is the ceiling of my downstairs neighbor. He’s pretty hostile. To me, to other people, to himself. He slammed the door behind him one day before proceeding to dart like a marathon runner to the neighborhood liquor store, manned by a gentle giant residing adjacent to hostile downstairs neighbor. His gentleness escapes from him, however, on football nights, and football Sunday.Yes, my neighbor owns the liquor store. No, it’s done nothing for me. Well I did buy a wine opener that broke almost immediately after using it. 

As for HDN (acronoym for Hostile Downstairs Neighbor)...well.. I did a few jump squats (Jillian Michaels...ya know) this AM and I think it made HDN pretty pissed. He took a broom or his fist (are his arms long enough for that?) and pounded on his ceiling, which is below the wood panels of architectureyness, which is below the wood floor I want but can’t have which is below the carpet below the table, and below the now overripe avocado etc etc.

I’m just here at my desk rambling in hopes to stay awake.