in which we take a Moment

and word-nerd on our faux-ancestors

So, if you’ve been around me for any length of time, you know I’ve got a penchant for weird and dead words.

I blame an early English class teacher who made all the “gifted” kids learn additional vocabulary words from Victorian England. I come by my usage of snollygoster honestly.

I also have a little problem with finding stacks of old photos at flea markets and buying piles of them from eBay.

I can’t help it. I see them and my brain just starts making that high-pitched squealy noise¹. If I get very quiet and honest with myself, it’s probably something to do with growing up as an adopted kid and wondering why my ancestors even were². My adopted grandma on my dad’s side was really into genealogy, and I sorely regret finding it more boring than watching beige paint dry at the time.

The piles of photos usually just kind of sit here in boxes, and I drag them out from time to time to use them as drawing reference. Or just to paw through them and marvel at how many clothes women were expected to wear in the dead of summer, when swamp ass is not just a vague concept, but a stark, moist reality.

A couple weeks ago, I’d started going through what I refer to as a Sacred Pause.

It’s probably more like mild depression, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I get it from time to time — it’s not a full-blown case of The Elephant sitting on my chest, just a sort of amped-up wheel-spinning phase that results in sleeping a lot and being entirely uninterested in anything and having a brain so blank it feels like I’m just kind of zombie-ing my way through the days. I want to do things, but I’m too mindwiped to care much.

Unlike actual depression, it’s sort of like a mental pause between breaths. Y’know how you can take a deep breath in, and there’s that second or two where everything just kind of hangs there, inflated, before you whoooosh out a long exhale? That’s what the Sacred Pause is for me, creatively speaking. I’ve probably hoovered up a whole lot of inspiration and information and excitement, and my brain reacts by doing absolutely freaking nothing for a minute.

It used to kind of freak me out. There’s this whole suspension of activity and motivation, and if I try to see what’s coming ahead, I see nothing but vague fog and an occasional cheeky moth. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with myself. I don’t feel like reading or doing anything; I’m usually so exhausted from….whatever it is my mind’s doing in the background, maybe?…that I just sleep like I’m training for a nice coma. And since I never know how long that will last, it’s a little bit anxious, too.

But, inevitably, I do eventually start to exhale.

Every time. I know this, after fiftysomeodd years of being alive in this particular body. Something will smack me on the proverbial back and all the air will start rushing out in a rapid wind.

Non-metaphorically speaking: After my brain does whatever it’s doing in the background with all the information/inspiration I’ve amassed, there’s a flurry of creative activity. I get ideas. Sometimes I even make things. It’s a very nice time to be in my head, essentially.

This time, it started when I was scanning my (rather obscene) collection of vintage photos.

I try to give myself busywork during the pauses, rather than just freeze up and go all fetal under the desk. Tends to be more productive, I find.

And I was saving all the .pngs of people I’ve never met, and putting them into an inspiration folder, right next to another file on the hard drive full of these old, dead words that I’ve collected, from memes and books and random places³.

And, as often happens, my mind was like old photos….old words….old photos…old words.

(insert long exhale here)

For three days now, I’ve been matching up photos with words, and assigning them meanings beyond the surface. I’ve been drawing all over the photos (see above) and adding words and their definitions.

I have something like forty of them already⁴.

They’ve pretty much turned themselves into this weird little oracle deck.

I haven’t modified any of them to fit on an actual, printable card yet, but I might. I’m just kind of playing (albeit intensely) and seeing where it goes. It may end up in some kind of physical deck; it may end up in nothing. I won’t know until I know.

But that’s why I’ve been vaguely quiet and distracted and absent for the past couple weeks.

The Pause. The Exhale. Working like a crazed spider monkey trying to get into a coconut using only a rock and sheer will.

Thanks for sticking with me while I’ve been all breathe-ey.

1. A noise, I will note, that it also makes when encountering a dog. Any dog. And sometimes shiny rocks. But most reliably, dogs.

2. I’m sure the Iron Lady would hear the KACHING of cash registers if I mentioned it to her. There’s some therapy up in there somewhere.

3. Coddiwomple, the title of the zine-style newsletter I mailed out for a year and a half, came directly from this file, for instance.

4. when I say “flood”, I mean flood, boyhowdy.