The Paralysis of Too Many Ideas

or: a quick journey through my mental forest

On the wall to my left is a chalkboard, framed in wood, vintage if you wanna be fancy, old if you’re being descriptive. It’s drilled into the wall and has a few of my writing ideas on it. I thought that putting ideas down would help me focus.

What’s up there now?

• Year of pretending

• Paradox of Allyship

• Down with “Elevate”

• Scotland campervan joy

• Van Abbe

• Didion - notebooks

These are all writing ideas. Some big, some small. Some new, some old.

When we returned from Scotland, actually while we were there, I started drafting something about how talking to people was shaping our vacation. People like Duncan in the Grantown-on-Spey who told me about the Caorunn Gin distillery tour and then called his friend Fiona who worked there to set us up on a tour we should have booked in advance, resulting in us getting an amazing private tour experience instead. Or there’s Kat Hill, who was picking up her partner from work at the most interesting cafe on the Isle of Skye from a design/architecture perspective. Our conversation started with me asking her about the place and ended with me learning she’s a non-fiction author. Next stop Fort William where my son and I stopped in at the Highlands Bookshop and bought their last signed copy of Kat’s new book, Bothy, from a Canadian bookseller.

View from Burr Cafe on the Isle of Skye. image credit: moi

I could go on. The man shouting “drones will be shot” at Glenfinnian Viaduct while we waited for the Harry Potter train. The tall, muscular, hyper-groomed kilted tour guide I saw at Eilean Donan castle (sorry, no pictures were taken). The funny books I saw in gift shops including Museum Bums (there’s an instagram) and Kilted Yoga book that is a missed opportunity for adult life-the-flap book if I’ve ever seen one.

There’s good material in that trip, and even if only from the “why you should talk to people instead of relying on your trip planning” angle.

But then there’s the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, which is taking decolonization seriously and had quotes from four postcolonial theorists up on the walls: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Benedict Anderson, and bell hooks. An article about their journey into decolonization would be awesome to put out in October when everyone will be writing about Dutch Design Week and only a couple people will notice this cultural phenomenon taking place in the other corner.

Then over the weekend, I went to a pig roast that my neighbor put on for his birthday. There’s a whole piece I’d love to write about my amazing neighbors, by the way. My daughter overheard someone say “Taiwan” twice and it turned out to be in in a bicycle context. That was how I met a guy who takes his wife’s bicycle in for maintenance every spring to the tune of 150 CAD a year plus parts. When I reacted with shock, he assumed that I don’t bike a lot and mansplained bicycle maintenance to me. His wife is a serious biker, you see, and racks up 3,500 km a year. I was doing math while he talked and realized that comes to about 9km/day. While living in Nijmegen, I spent nearly ten years biking 15 km a day on school days to get kids back and forth to school, on a bike that lived outside and never got an annual maintenance.

So thinking about that plus my recent experience listening to Fran Lebowitz’s reader (must listen, she had me in stitches) left me with ideas for a humorous piece on Dutch bicycle maintenance along the lines of “just keep riding” as an answer to everything along with a lot of “paying someone else to fix your bike is for the weak and the wasteful.” Expat humor, more or less. Canadians are precious about bike riding and after three years of listening to it, I’m ready to poke the beast.

But Fran Lebowitz also got me thinking about how to approach the Joan Didion pieces I’ve been reading and the 24-hour long biography I listened to while on vacation and there’s potential there for a piece about the definitions of “keep” and Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook.”

And then I started listening to Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle King (check out the review), who I really want to meet when I go back to North Carolina. She writes about Taiwanese TV chef and cookbook author Fu Pei-Mei in a historical/political/cultural context, which is amazing because my mom was one of those Taiwanese abroad who never learned to cook at home and owns Pei-Mei’s first and second cookbooks, although I grew up with them as the red and blue Chinese cookbooks. King addresses so many issues I’ve thought about that I’m even more excited to get my hands on the copy my mom got me. I’m hoping there are notes because I have so many questions. And I’m realizing that leaving the States in 2004 is one of the reasons I don’t know more Taiwanese folks my age. Also, I’m trying to figure out how to approach Michelle so she wants to talk to me.

And did I mention the other person I sent an email to who is also interested in Fluxus?

And did I mention the two presentations I’ll be giving in Calgary this month?

And did I mention the article I just submitted about year-end reviews for authors?

And so here’s my question…. if you are a human being whose mind works like this, how do you pick a thing, stick with a thing, and get anything done?

And another question - who would want to publish any of these things?

I’m confident the writing ideas are good, specific stories that open up into the global/universal. I would love to do the research and am excited to take on the challenge of turning any of the topics into a compelling read. But I have no idea where to start and seem unable to draw a line around a topic to keep myself focused.

So, I decided to just sit down and spill my guts to y’all and see what comes back. Any suggestions? Advice? Favorite topics? Anyone want to sit down and help me figure out what to work on and how to bridge the gap between ideas and a finished piece?

Maybe I just need to invest in 20 sided dice, roll, choose, and move on.

Also, if you’re wondering what goes into my morning pages, they probably read a lot like this.

This is my current paralysis, the reason you aren’t getting newsletters and that I haven’t pitched or even written a thing for a few weeks. If you have thoughts, opinions, or ideas about who I should talk to, please let me know!

And thanks for reading. I needed this.