Collecting So Easy a Caveman Could Do It

Our Paleolithic blood is still pumping. Past our physical and mental and technological leaps from the knuckle-draggers, we're still just beings on the prowl. We live in the Land of Abundance where we're able to look past the chains of survival. Food is readily available and medicine has never been better. Immorality is closer than ever! 

And how did we get here? How did we flourish to seven billion and counting, sharing one big rock? I don't dare attempt a scientific explanation because, at this point, I don't have one. What I plan to offer is ideas. We're hunter-gatherers, through and through, and I think we're even more than that. 

Look closer and we're pieces. We're fingernails, hair, eyeballs, and guts. Grab a microscope and we're cells. We're bacteria and viruses. Split the atoms and we're chromosomes and DNA and neutrons and protons. Go deeper and I couldn't even tell you where we go next. Something tells me there is more to that two-and-a-half-pound grey mass in our heads. Step back from it all and these collections are just mechanisms to express the intangible. Our brains fire off the instructions to dance numbers and martial arts. The sum of our teeth, tongues, saliva, and nerves make up the languages of our cultures. Further and further, the collections we call ourselves deliver the coordinates for us to explode further into deep space than we've ever known.

And what does it all mean? The collections that make up us end up collecting the world around us. Think of it this way: Forrest Gump said life is like a box of chocolates, but he forgot that boxes of chocolates often have the flavors printed on the inside. We can choose to be surprised or we can choose to engineer delicious choices. 

Instead of leaving it up to chance and traffic and a long day at work this past week, I put the pedal to the floor and rocketed toward The City. Artist and writer Austin Kleon was speaking at the McNally Jackson bookstore and I was not going to miss it. Steal Like An Artist is his newest book and after living online for months as a Powerpoint, the printed version has become a New York Times Bestseller. It is such a simple and beautiful breakdown of the essence of creativity. It has resonated for me far beyond the first read. And there I was.

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To delve into creativity and stolen art, Kleon hosted a panel discussion with three female bloggers - litblogger Maud Newton, the creator of Brain Pickings, Maria Popova, and creator of Tumblr Slaughterhouse 90210 Maris Kreizman. Pouring over favorite television shows and their individual creative processes, the guts of the show really got to one of my favorite ideas in Steal Like An Artist. On lucky page number 13, Kleon wrote, "The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love." 

As kids, we had rock collections and baseball cards. We had action figures and Barbie dolls. What do we have to collect now? Are we collecting currency in the hopes that it will change our circumstances, maybe take us further away from the reminder that some people have to hunt and gather in an age of abundance? Are we collecting friends to extend our social circle further and guarantee our security from "predators" or creditors? Are we collecting degrees with the shaky promise that it will assure our success in the systems our ancestors and us have slowly built?

What we really need to collect is what sent us forward. From hairy monkeys to straight-backed brainiacs, ideas gave us the freedom to evolve. Everything that has even been created by a human has first and foremost been an idea. Even that idea is an idea I collected from someone else I can't remember. We're building on top of one another to get to higher ground. Immortality is right around the corner!

If you're collecting things you don't love, stop it. Stop it right now. There is no time or space or energy worth collecting something that doesn't resonate with you. We forget that we make the choices and when we forget that, we become victims to the hoards. We're bombarded everyday and we fall prey to the big, bad world. 

Unplug and reset. Start the game over. Matter of fact, pretend it's a game. Unleash your beast mode onto the world and collect gems along the way. You'll defeat demons and kiss princesses and climb down tall flagpoles. Right now, I'm sure there are probably some ideas swirling around in your head that you hold dear. Worship them. Brand them on your forearms and revel in the pain. It could be that you believe there are aliens out there, watching us. Or you think Bobcat Goldthwait deserves more attention for his movies. Or you're sure, in your heart of hearts, that Zooey Deschanel just might be that cute in person too. 

Seriously, we've all done it before. Collected ideas make up our workouts and study habits and recipes. Experience is the trail we follow to collecting these ideas, and as long as we remember what we brought along with us, it only makes us a more interesting and invested character. Think of Jesus, or Lance Armstrong. Crucifix necklaces and yellow plastic bracelets remind us to simply be more. It is a constant reminder. Why not develop your own system? Collect the right thoughts and collect the right ideas and until next time we explode into space.

Where Blogging Fails Us

I can remember it like yesterday. She sat there batting her eyelashes while I rambled on about jiu-jitsu and the adventures of my job hauling junk out of people's homes. It was the coolest introduction I had to my life story. I felt like the protagonist of The Great American Trash Novel. And my confidence about my situation got me there.

We dated for some time after that but just as our relationship faded, so did my blue-collar identity. Because, of course, it's a bit more complicated than that.

For a while it felt right even when it felt a bit wrong - when I was god-awful tired. Or I was working overtime. Or I couldn't afford to move out of my parent's house. Again.

And, sometimes, still I find myself wondering about that first date. It all felt so right and put together. Today I'm more surrounded by computers than torn-up couches and garbage bags. I can sit at my desk and help customers build websites for their creative ventures all day long. The benefits are great and the community is even better. I find myself staying at the office more than my apartment just to hang out. How could I have been so confident about the kind of lifestyle most people would scratch their heads over?

And I think I've fallen on the answer. Identity.

What I was doing became me. I had a clear sense of the things I wanted to fill my day with and it felt great to share that with someone who didn't already have a glimpse into my world. It was a proud sense of accomplishment, challenging myself with physically demanding tasks that most people don't dream of doing. It was easy to nail everything down with labels too. Fighter. Junk Hauler. Writer.   

Life informed writing and writing informed life.

It wasn't just reading things to regurgitate them on my own page, it was putting things into practice.  

And I see the difference now. Jiu-jitsu and hauling junk forced me to be part of communities with disciplined practice. I talked and wrestled with people all day long. I read books about human interaction, goal-setting, and the paralysis of choice. And I practiced it every day with my hobby, my job, and my love life. 

With my current job I find myself typing more than talking. I'm chatting with customers to build their sites. My teenage self couldn't have dreamed of a way to get paid to instant message people all day long.

And there is the challenge. Seth Godin (sort of) jokes that no one has talker's block. There is barely hesitation, we just do it. With writing, we get in our own heads about it.

I find myself doing the opposite - having the courage and discipline to write without the ability or opportunity to talk all that much. Don't get me wrong - I have friends, I hang out, and I don't have laryngitis. I just need to find a way to make my life more than writing and put more of my life into it.

Idea Sex

Some of my best ideas have come from storms of conversations in dark bars or while yelling playfully with friends over campfires.Nothing makes me feel more alive than having a discussion where I end up understanding the world better than I did before. It teases me that there is a meaning to nail down. You have the meaning of life by the tail just a bit more when you can bounce your ideas off of someone else. It's orgasmic in a different way. It’s idea sex.

The Work
Ideas may sometimes come as jolts. That's true. But visual artist Ann Hamilton makes a point when she jokes that no one sits down to be creative. There is no punch clock, there is no finish line. 

Don’t be fooled, there is actual work to creativity. It just feels like some big secret. We pretend artists and writers are a special group of people destined to be weird and moody. But as E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, wrote, "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."  It's not a one-and-done process, it is a meditation, a lifestyle. What Hamilton was poking at is that creativity is not a noun, it’s a verb. It is making the time to open your mind and ask questions. It is the practice you need to produce your best work. We don’t know when it will come and we don’t know if it will come, but you need to sit down and do the work. 

The Good Stuff
The process in and of itself can be maddening. There is an intense pressure of a billion tiny thoughts firing in your brain when you’re trying to create something to move you and the world around you. It’s no surprise some of the most amazing artists of our time have been seriously fucked up.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, beautifully challenged the tormented artist image in her TED talk “Your Elusive Creative Genius”. Gilbert found comfort in the ancient Greek and Roman ideas of a creative genius not being within you but being an external divine presence grateful enough to loan their powers to us mere mortals for some time. It took the burden off the “artist” to acknowledge that his “genius” or divine partner did or did not deliver. No artistic ego or suffering needed.

I’d like to take that idea one step further from Gilbert and the Greek genius. I believe we are all divine partners of one another. You’ve heard the theories. We’re all One. You’re the sum of your five closest friends. And now with the magic of the Internet, we’re all connected, sharing ideas and colliding off one another. 

Every tweet is an invitation to idea sex.

The work of creativity multiplies with idea sex. And we can have it all the time. We can have multiple partners. We can do weird stuff. It is some freaky, tantric sex connection where your ideas and others collide to make something new. It is the pleasure of sex and the joy of birth all in a moment. Sharing anything less is masturbation.

When I write, I need to reference other people. Each of the thinkers that have influenced me have put ideas out into the world for others to take and do what they will. There is no pretending for me that my thoughts are only my own. It is just the unique, swirling combination of my experiences and my days. 

The Result
The trouble is none of this is possible if we don’t share our thoughts and our work. 

You have to make yourself available and vulnerable in a completely human way. It’s terrifying and exciting all at once. And it requires you to sort out your thoughts and make something.

Blackout poet and author Austin Kleon takes the creative process to heart. While inspiration or genius, or whatever you may call it, may not come every time we sit down, Kleon believes in the process of delivering and publishing work constantly to draw that genius closer. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. 

We're meant to do this. Idea sex is the new evolution. As psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna put it, biological evolution ended with language. We have transformed the landscape of the world with our idea sex. And the more we come together, the more complex we get. Matt Ridley points out in his brilliant TED talk that no single person in this world knows how to make a pencil, much less a computer mouse. Comedian Joe Rogan considers the sophisticated level of which our world operates by asking, "If I left you alone in the woods with a hatchet, how long before you can send me an email?" We are nothing without one another because there is no artist without audience. There is no artist without art.

Nothing is original. Nothing is instant. So go have idea sex and you’re sure to change the world in the process.

Not My Grandfather

The guy they put in that coffin was not my grandfather. He didn't even look like him - makeup visibly caked on his lips, chest flat and silent.

Henry Scharch, my grandfather, was one of the happiest guys I ever knew. In the handful of times I saw my grandparents every year, we never had a true sit-down heart-to-heart but he was always quick to ask me about my life and smile. He sang and cracked jokes and desperately adored his wife, Ruth, even if she cared a bit too much for him toward the end.

Bronnie Ware cared for the elderly in Australia for some time before she noticed some common regrets they admitted facing the big finale. They boiled down to regrets about working too hard, caring too little, and failing to find the courage to express their feelings and live the life they imagined.

I like to think my grandfather had none of those. I could be totally wrong. I might never know. 

All I know for sure is I'm alive. There is no time for wasted time. And life is bullshit if you're not living your own. 

My grandfather wasn't an artist or a writer. He didn't make a million dollars. But he did deliver the mail for some years and befriend a dog named Petey. He did play with his grandkids without ever rolling his eyes once at their endless antics. He did make me laugh almost every time I saw him. And even though it wasn't him snug in that box, shielded from the winter wind that cracked my family's faces, I cried when I placed a flower on top and walked away.

Intro to Film 101

Intro to Film 101 is not meant to break open the skull. It is an introductory class, that's why there is a 101 after it. But Professor John Belton changed my life in a way he probably never knew the first day of class.

What I wanted to be when I grew up from college was a filmmaker so taking Intro to Film 101 was necessary and expected. I buzzed in my front-row seat on the first day of class.

Belton looked like John Goodman's brother with an allergy to smiling, but I thought I could overlook that if it meant I got to watch and study films for legit collegiate credit.

He began class with a warning. In the most dramatic way, he said, if you stay this class, you'll never see film the same again. 

It was no stroking of his own ego, it was the truth. He made clear that learning what it takes to study and analyze film would color your perspective in appreciating it as an art form. For every class you learned more of the behind the scenes, you saw the character on the celluloid differently. You knew what kind of decisions were being made to get that shot, you saw where and how the camera had to travel to get the shot. 

But it made it all that more magical when you forgot everything, or just couldn't figure out how you got where you were. It's the twist in Fight Club or the cinematography of 2001: A Space Odyssey. How did they do that, you have to ask!

Professor Belton was right, not just about film, but about life. Your knowledge colors your experience, for better or for worse. You can't know how until you're there and that's a good lesson for life. We can only set out to do something, wherever we end is what we've done.