giving yourself permission

It's not the physical satisfaction, it's the physical habit.

Having OCD & quitting smoking is...  I don't think I can tell you.  The physical habit is the thing.  Being a smoker causes a whole series of physical tics that the Art Brain becomes conditioned to; these manifest as tics and tendencies that are a bastard to get on top of.  They become determinants.  They determine the amount of time one spends doing anything.  They structure the day.  But no more.  It has to be me, not the habit, that does these things.  It was always me.  It must be my volition, not my addictive tendency, that organizes my day.  How else am I to admit joy into my life?  Where is the room for it to grow?  So.

Long story short I threw away my one-hitter this morning.  I've been using that thing over a decade.  Its case had been physically reshaped by the constant use; its base had been machine-level when purchased, but after ten years plus its posterior surface more resembled a well-tempered anvil than anything resembling flat.  A constant companion and witness to my degenerate addiction, that device.

Walked up to the end of Kathy Osterman pier and slung it as far as I could into lake Michigan:  my last act of pollution in this life.

With it I gave myself permission to let go of the behaviors I had taken on, in my adoption of the habit of smoking from my first boyfriend, Cameron, when I gave him money to buy a pack of cigarettes but then insisted on smoking half.  Just to be petty.  Made myself sick doing it, like a natural born idiot.  Smoking was a thing gay boys in the South did.  It became a socialization thing, a homosocial bond, especially at the time I adopted the habit, in the 90s.  It became part of being closeted, too.  And once the act of smoking became attached to my fondness for marijuana it became this ingrained, criminal, furtive behavior associated with a whole life that ended decades ago.  I am not a criminal, I am not a closeted scared kid, I am a well-adjusted angry old faggot who has to let the bad go along with the habit.  I'm holding onto a whole world that doesn't HAVE to exist, for me, in this life, any longer, by holding onto smoking and the little rituals of addiction and the self-segregation that smoking causes.  So today I gave myself permission to let it go.

And then did the little act of necessary defiance and sacrifice and consign a physical manifestation of a decade and change of my life to the sedimentary floor of a lake greater than any I have heretofore known.  That part of me can stay there, down deep where nobody will find it but me, when I think on all the little wasted seconds that went into that stuff.  Smoking is a motherfucker.  I won't miss it.

out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.