Late Nights; Leonardo's Mirror

Like many workplaces in Toronto, we play Jazz FM at ours. Only ours is in our living room. And right now it is 1:30 in the morning.

Working for yourself means you set your own hours... which means you work all the time. It has gotten to the point where when I think about someone going home at the end of the day, I often think to myself, "Okay, then what? What are those people doing all night?" Cause they're not working.

Not that I work very minute of every day. I'm a creative guy, so sometimes I just slack off and serf the web or play video games. In any job, that would be procrastination and grounds for dismissal. For me, I like to think of it as recharging. People may think it is easy to just make shit up. To those people, I often quote Leonardo DiVinci who said, "Shut your fucking trap."

Only he wrote it backwards in a mirror. Honestly, the guy invented the helicopter and the tank - you gotta make sure that your peeps don't steal that shit. Here's a thought. That writing stuff in a mirror as a code shit was pretty smart. Do you think he wrote that backwards, so people wouldn't steal that idea?

Everytime I sit down to write I imagine myself crafting some exquisitely ornate thematic structure, where everything is interrelated but you don't know it until the end. And somehow, I just ramble. I had read a long time ago Mark Twain once signed a long letter, "This would have been shorter had I more time to write it." Turns out someone said that in a letter a long time before Sammy. Most of the famous quotes we know weren't said by the people we attribute them to. They were said first by someone who got something right once in their life but didn't get the credit. Once I told a guy a joke, and he repeated it to the whole grade three class like it was his. He got all the laughs. Huh - just like being a movie writer.

All of this does actually have a theme, about the little recognized lifestyle of the creative worker. Okay, maybe you really have to want to see it. But most people have this image of someone banging their head against the typewriter or piano or whatever and then having some sort of epiphany and creating their whole work in one perfect burst of inspiration. People really want that to be true.

The real truth is very few people know how to manage a creative lifestyle. There's no books about it. You go to school, they certainly don't discuss your daily schedule. If you work in an office environment, you probably work hours best suited for banks and farmers, not you.

Who am I kidding, there's no theme here. Just some 1:30 Am babbling. Forget it. I've got to start my work.