How to survive a woman who threatens your universe at the atomic level

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universal photocopier“I’m pissed off.” The red haired woman states the obvious, with equally obvious venom.

I think I hate her. The realization is sudden, visceral, and acute. My stomach has made up its mind. She presents as an archetype I’ve spent my life avoiding eye contact with in high school hallways and grim office elevators. Not that I can’t come around – I’ve done it before – but the photocopier she did battle with earlier has my sympathies. And now that I’ve sacrificed the sleeves of my sweater to her jury-rigged straightjacket, there’s no turning back.

“I can see that,” I say. “Three minutes, will you give me just three minutes?”

“You’ve got a captive audience, girl.”

Swallowing her ‘girl’ with quiet martyrdom, I take her ever so gently through a 3 Minute Sense Scroll Mindfulness Meditation – my go to innovation that has helped my own brain rewire to focus its attentions, engage with the environment, and emerge from internal constructs/conflicts.

“There.” I breath deeply, feeling quite relaxed myself. My perception of my client is momentarily softened and compassion is awakened by my reconnection to self. “Are you feeling a little more grounded now?”

“No.”

The word is spit with a certain – yes I’m certain – gleeful malice that hits me right in the gut. How could any brain resist such a powerful tool? Must be out of spite. But why would any mind fight its natural craving for balance and peace? Her death stare is unrelenting, and now she’s fidgeting in her straightjacket and stretching my sleeves more and more by the second. I’m appalled by her total disregard for another person’s property. The photocopier becomes personified in my mind, poor thing. I empathize with its jamming now that the gears in my own head are locking up. And here she is traumatizing something else that doesn’t belong to her. Bitch.

“Shit.” I say. To which she looks triumphant. Drawing a blank in the face of such hostility, I reluctantly serve the cat her cream: “So why don’t you just tell me what’s pissing you off.”

I see her mouth open as she sucks in not only all the air in the office, but all available energy too, extending her vacuum to rob our oxygen atoms of their very spin as they’re drawn into her black void of negativity. I swear my eyeballs bulge and the overhead florescents flicker and dim as their photons are stretched and dragged screaming, tearing, into the abyss. Only a black hole or an angry woman can disrupt the space-time continuum – I know this, just ask my husband. But I could never match this wild haired force of nature. Sleeve assault aside, this woman’s utter disregard for the room’s atomic balance leaves nothing even remotely sustaining for me. Bitch.

“Wait!” I cry out, all hard-won professionalism abandoned. “I have a better idea.”

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Make love to the world or make the world’s perfect salad?

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terry richardson perfect saladDon’t get me wrong, I’ve worked jobs in both industries, but there comes a time when a girl’s got to break free and make the choice to say THIS is who I am…

Yes, that is sweet potato, and yes, it was perfectly deliciousThis brain is blessed with the genetic trick to be able to translate the raw violence of our humanity into short black strokes on a page. Words. I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the creator of worlds, demands a physicality. I have clothed my body in my own designs, used objects and images to pull people into exotic, intoxicating paradigms – where I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the woman, craves the deepest connection. Love. Faith. Family. A loyalty and consistency so in conflict with the gnashing Rimbaud mind. Love. I tease him, hold him, roll him around… But it is never enough.

Yes, that is sweet potato, and yes, it was perfectly deliciousI live for ideas, and for story. I am an exploration, and I am a woman. There is no ‘happy middle ground’. So what then? Be Lee Miller? Blaze through my own physicality, run a bath at the high point, then submit to decay? Be Terry Richardson / Olivier Zahm? Run around with a camera in one hand and my manhood in the other? Flash a nipple once every dozen posts or so, just to keep my audience hooked? No.

Perfect salad?Do I blog my way to the world’s perfect salad? Harness my creative intellect and train it down, tame it down, to service the ultimate temporal/individual subjective? Just to make everybody else happy and safe? No. Not when the perfect salad is a frank impossibility, especially when compared to the tempting universality of the perfect blow job. NO.

Take ‘time’ out of the equation and the ‘world’ disappears. There is only this moment of interaction, you and I, giving and receiving. What if I told you I’ve found a way? Not to straddle, oscillate between, or deny these conflicting extremes of existence, but a format for their expression and a place to mediate alternative, individualized, solutions? Would you believe me? Would you dare? After a dedicated program of study in current brain science and the historical evolution of ideas, the time has come for me to say: “Let’s both have the balls to find out.”
good times?If the only way to draw instant creative  success in our current cultural paradigm is for me to dance naked down the street with BlankCanvasLiving.com plastered all over my body, then no. So it might be just us for a while. That’s fine with me. I’ll do my very best to tease you, hold you, roll you around in storied ideas until you beg not for release, but for permission to take our warm, close world into your own.

The exact moment I realize I’m wasting my life

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Spinning with the Earth at 1675 km/h, we humans are always and only ‘falling through time’. We feign power and control over our most precious, non-renewable resource with an abuser’s vocabulary – using, taking, spending, wasting… killing. In contrast, the words associated with our time efficiencies and generosities have somewhat religious overtones – saving, making, creating, giving. We express love through the valuing and sharing of time. And if we love ourselves, deeply, truly, is killing time the ultimate betrayal?

Slow day at work… do I write my future or stall it through distraction? The word search is almost too easy to rationalize. The 60 words are 60 novelists, so I’m not killing time… I’m learning. Ya, that’s it! Schooling myself for writer street-cred name dropping with a two-birds-one-stone pleasant pastime, the very essence of intelligent efficiency.

endless wordsearchALCOT, AMIS, AUSTEN – there’s HEMINGWAY in the middle there – BAINBRIDGE… BUCHAN is taking some time, no matter, I’m leeearning. Oh, there’s ORWELL along the top, but where’s BUCHAN? I dedicate myself to BUCHAN with full intensity pattern recognition/scanning, picking out all the BU’s and CH’s. Minutes pass… I start to get the same sick feeling in my stomach I used to get after too many Saturday morning cartoons (and still get after too much celebrity gossip). Screw it, we’re going old school here, line by line…

I do this twice. There is no BUCHAN! WTF?? This is so wrong it hurts. But just as stubborn as Rihanna going back to Chris Brown (don’t get me started!), I deny the atrocity and jump right back in. Sometimes the universe sends you a message, and sometimes that message is ELIOT with one L in the list, but two in the grid!?? This is officially BULL! with two Ls anywhere you find it!

I sit staring at the word search in numb disbelief. This is against all the rules! The contract of trust is broken. How can I ever commit to a word search again? Maybe crosswords aren’t even sacred! Two more go-to distractions tainted. But this is a wake-up; I can feel it in my bones. I can’t waste any more time.

I do the only thing that’s ever made my stomach stop churning. I put the story into my own words.

Dear Friday, how could have I let you see me like this?

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Startled? Shocked? Horrified? All of the above. How could this have happened? Oh, I could give you a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I’m wearing slacks today – not pants or trousers, but honest to goodness slacks. And I swear I’m only surfing celebrity gossip to calm my beta-brain into a blissful alpha interim before boosting back up to finish my intellectual tome-of-the-moment (and it’s a really thick one too). But on the surface, I have completely submitted to the stereotype: the hair, a bun; my shoes, practical; my cardigan (yes, cardigan), thigh grazing and demure. I’m even drinking from our office kitchen’s “make every day a Friday!” mug. The horror.

Now, before I confess what I’m about to, I’m trusting you to understand something, that this moment does not define me. Just as I’ll trust that wherever you might find yourself today – in whatever footwear – that you, at least, have hope that someday you will find your own expression of whatever marvelous uniqueness your soul is coded to contain. That said…

My full surrender to the stereotype came as I reached into my desk drawer and dug out a cherry filled chocolate from my secret stash… and then another. Yes, dear readers, I’m typing this with still-sticky fingers. I’m living the very paradigm I’ve spent a lifetime trying desperately to escape. And I ask myself… What effect does environment really have, on our identities, our actions, our morale? Maybe we are not so independent of circumstance? Maybe my day job is more than a time ticker? Maybe you and I are risking more of ourselves than we realize? So let’s do something radical this weekend. You and me. Pinky swear…

Risking everything to get from Here to There

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Once, on stage, I blanked out. I stood there stupidly, holding a silent, quivering flute, cantilevered out into nothingness.

Once, before a deadline, I blanked out. I sat there stupidly, hating my hands for shaking, this time over a keyboard, poised over an article that would never be written.

Now I sit here risking everything promised by our current paradigm, but my hands are steady. These words are my own. There is no fear beyond the slow, mild panic of a human engaging her humanity. There is no composer’s melody to forget, and no interviews to transcribe. There can be no ‘blanking’ out because this is Blank Canvas Living. This is a living dialogue. This is a brain exploring, within and without. This is freedom.

Who are you? Who do you want to be? Risk asking.

But more than that – risk knowing.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom – Anais Nin

To blossom in this world takes a sharp act of will, fierce and unwavering. There can be no permission. Blank Canvas Living’s  tips/techniques, personal style guide, creative living exercises, and experiments in engagement are designed to loosen our jumbled neural associations and give us the freedom to learn our brains, love them, and blossom according to our most primal coding. Backed by a five year dedicated study into the evolution of ideas (from prehistory through to today), and ongoing philosophical field testing, Blank Canvas Living is an interactive forum for passionate people who share a high need for cognition and sensory/sensual involvement.