Tach-ing out

I do not take drugs. Well, okay, the odd Extra Strength Tylenol. But hey, all the kids with headaches were doing it.

Anyways, it is my understanding that cocaine brings the sensation of clarity and sends your entire being into a state of overdrive. Your engine doesn’t idle. It runs at full speed and if you’re lucky, you’ll never shift it from neutral to drive or you’ll explode into a wall.

Whether it’s true or not, that’s what I feel like right now, in the creative sense.

Everything about me is running at full speed and then some. Every sense is attuned to the universe and picks up every scintilla of stimulation, translating those sensations into thought and eventually into word.

And while I embrace this period of unbridled energy, particularly after a couple of months of intellectual torpor (or at least that’s what it felt like to me), this constant revving of my creative engines has its problems.

Am I making sense? The words flow out so quickly and the paper cup overflows so easily that I don’t leave myself much time to analyze what I am writing to determine if it isn’t just the word “banana” over and over and over again. (Or the word “over”, for that matter.)

Can I finish anything? Because I find so much joy in the creative process, I worry that I jump from project to project without actually completing anything. Building the seminal moments and scenes for my next screenplay are so much more fun than actually writing 110 pages of dialogue that I am seriously running the risk of waking up two weeks from now surrounded by ideas for 68 movies, but no actual scripts.

How quickly can I become ambidextrous? I have two hands, why can’t I write in two notebooks or on two laptops at the same time? I want to believe that it would cut the noise down by 50%, but something tells me that it would just feed the monster, which would expect 4 times the output. If my toes weren’t the size of rhinoceros heads, perhaps I could up my output even further.

And even if I can finish all of the projects that are exploding out of me, how do I keep them from just hitting the bottleneck of “So, now what?” It took me years, and a very caring friend, to help me deal with the backlog of comedy sketches I wrote during my time at Toronto’s Second City Training Centre and since then.

Must pull my head out of my laptop long enough to transition some of these projects from Word and Final Draft documents into actual films and television shows. (BTW, “pull my head out of my laptop” reads a little weirder than it sounded in my head.)

Oooooh! The ideas are only 30 seconds apart! Must remember my breathing exercises.

Oh god, my creative water broke! Quick, someone get me a notebook, a pen and two Extra Strength Tylenol!

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