Repurposing the Broken Things in My Life

 

I truly recognized it today for the first time, this pattern of the last few months. Not that I didn't see it happening physically, only that I didn't see it for it what it was until now. 

I've been angry about my writer's block and my reader's block. These are two things I used to take a great deal of enjoyment in doing. I've had to pivot my creative output into other avenues because my old stand-bys are on indefinite leave. Part of me hates this because it's the longest blockage I've had since I actively started focusing on my writing some 20+ years ago. The other part of me hates it because I can almost taste the potential stories on the tip of my mind's tongue. Frustratingly out of reach. 

My music block is another one that's been really tough to grapple with these days. I've got some gigs coming up thankfully, which has lit a fire under my ass to really get back into it, but it's been an uphill battle. 

You might be wondering where I've been putting all that creative energy then. Where might that fountain of weird be flowing? 

Call of Cthluhu

You've maybe seen the name, but may not know anything about it. Based on the writings of HP Lovecraft, the crew at Chaosium created a role-playing game in 1981 that would be based in Lovecraft's 1920s. Instead of god-like heroes saving the world from evil in the high-fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu's Prohibition-era stories would pit regular people against extraordinary cosmically horroriffic situations where they would ultimately lose (their minds, their lives, or both in succession). 

I've been reading through these books since last summer during lockdown, anxious to run games for my friends. Once I moved into this house, I set up the basement and began running regular sessions. While we currently play the pre-published scenarios from Chaosium (and other 3rd parties), I'm homebrewing my own storyline in the background. So, while my regular short story fiction is nowhere to be found, my brain cannot stop perpetuating the fictional story line that my friends will get to play later. It is a fascinating deviation from my norm, and is time-consumptive in good ways. 

There is the same creativity there, but it's manifesting itself in a different format. There is story being built and experienced and retooled in real time rather than on the blank snowscape of an empty page. The broken is being repurposed. 

Art (or: "I Really Loved That Coffee Mug")

When creating my homebrew stuff for Call of Cthulhu, there is a fair amount of prep-work involved in creating handouts for the players to consume and read through to find the clues they need to make it through the scenario. Some of the handouts included with the material are fine; plenty are not, or are simply missing, so of course the internet has been populated with updated handouts, handouts that are more readable, etc. 

There are letters to be written and notes to be passed along to one player or several. There are items to be made that are, again, clues to solving whatever mystery is occuring. Because of this need for props, I begain learning how to melt wax and stamp it on the back of an envelope (which creates a really cool vibe for anyone opening the letter). There is collage work that I do very rarely, but which I've been doing more of recently. 

And then I saw a video of a French abstract artist and realized that I'd honestly wanted to give painting a serious try. So I bought some paints and some canvases and began following pretty loose interpretation of his video and have come to love the process. There are very serious flaws with these first two that I'm hoping to fix. I'm sure a professional would stress them less and have a better solution, but this is pure play. This is experimentation. This is being stuck in a lab where you don't know all the instruments, but you wanna learn how to use them all anyway. 

My favorite coffee mug was given to me by a woman at the local library when she brought me on to help give out constructive crticism to other writers in the neighborhood who may not normally have that resource. That was a really fulfilling time (even though it made for a relatively late night). 

That mug broke earlier this week. Right out of the dishwasher. The break was so clean it sliced up various parts of my hand before I even realized it. I debated gluing it back together as it served up the perfect size cup of coffee...but I needed some cleaning water for today's experiment in acrylics and that was the moment I realized that I've simply been trying to repurpose the broken things in my life. Not fix them, but taking the time to look at them in different ways and through different lenses in order to see what other ways they can be beneficial or put to use. 

It's only been a few days, but I'm finding the exploratory nature of simply acting upon the canvas to be wildly head-clearing. Though I have no earthly idea what I'm actually doing, I'm loving the process. Choosing from one of a hundred foreign tools in order to convey an idea feels like writing did during grad school: POTENTIAL. And not just in terms of being objectively good or bad, only that the learning, the process, is the fun part of the experience. 

Me

Which leads us, inevitably, just back to me. I'm clearly in the middle of repurposing myself, which...honenstly, we should all take time to do at some point. Viewpoints change, new evidence arrives, new life moments occur, and through it all, time keeps moving onward and upward, leaving us in the dust of its wake. Outputs are changing and all I can do is keep making sure that I'm repurposing the broken parts of me into other avenues that work. 

I'm sure we'll get back to the regular writing eventually, but this feels like a pretty good wave to ride for a cool minute. 

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