Procrastination...and other sovereign countries

The problem with finding reasons for putting off writing is that there really are ALWAYS other things to be doing. Other valid tasks that need accomplished...stacks of papers to be graded, children to be snuggled (as my daughter announces "I looooove hugs and kisses," grinning expectantly), compelling movies to watch, time to be spent with a significant other, dishes to be washed...naps to be taken...on and on. It's never that I don't plan to write; I just plan to write "later": a "later" that never seems to happen unless I (feeling selfish for doing so) make it. Some afternoons after my class day is done, I head to the local library, upstairs to the left and aaaaaaalllll the way tucked in the far back corner where there is a comfortable chair with a table right beside, surrounded by windows on three sides and stacks on the fourth. This has become my favorite place to write. It is like a private tree house with the huge live oaks draped in Spanish moss peeking in at eye level: it is a beautiful place where my childlike inner mind can play with writing again. I love those afternoons, selfishly ferreted away from my loving family, my poor wife dealing with both kids, my daughter aggravating her every second about where I am (she is, at three, in a stage where I, as the “opposite gendered” parent, am very much her favorite…unless of course the dads are around J ). Today, though, there is no time for a library day. And today there is a poem rattling around in my head. So I know that there will be time spent today, head bend over notebook, pen in hand, doing what I am meant to be doing. Poetry has always been that for me, more insistent. Like an itch. It will bug me until I pull myself away from other tasks and take out my notebook. My fiction takes more work...which, incidentally, is why it is always on the back burner...a hundred story ideas always battling for attention like orphaned children. Pages and pages of unfinished fiction march along like army ants in my tight lines of penmanship through the white pages of my notebook. Intimidating blocks of pages filled with ink that call to me, beg for just one minute more...the truth is, I really want to finish them. But they scare me. I'm afraid of them. Literally. I don't really know what I am so afraid of. Will the characters come out of the stories and accuse me for not creating them well. (It makes me think of that Phyllis Wheatley poem about sending her poem "children" half-clothed ragamuffins into a world clearly unprepared to care for them...she wrote that after a volume of her poems was published by some well meaning man in her life without her permission.) Will the ending fall flat? I wouldn't know, would I, since I never seem to get there. I know that I have both in me: the fiction and the poetry. But I never seem able to shut up and produce. I feel unable, not strong enough, to get the task accomplished. Am I hoping that maybe someone else will come along and do it for me? Not possible. And even if it were, I doubt I would be so pleased with the result. So I guess my point is that there are other things in my life besides my writing. And that is, on the one hand, very frustrating. But if these other things didn’t exist…how would I ever get any thinking done?! Growing up, I always imagined that the writer’s life was a lonely place, that to be a writer was to stand apart, isolated from all others—the suffering and aloof observer. But in my adult life I have learned that the idea is only a half truth: I am constantly balancing the razor edge between observing my life and living it. Some days (today), I guess, are for the living.