unsmush

People at work are driving me a little batty. Everyone is coming up to me and saying I heard you’re leaving for Trader Joe’s! NO, FOOLS! I AM A WORD ARTIST NOT A DESK JOCKEY!


I’m leaving to get on with my creative life, to create the life I want to live. I’m leaving for the freedom to persue dreams, I leaving because this air-conditioned, beige cubicle is murdering my muse! I went back into my original Nashville-move journal last night and it was full of gems, poetry, beautiful thoughts, story ideas, creativity.

Now my journals read like laundry lists. “I am so sad and bored and stuffed up” blah blah blah. It is possible for a place to stifle a person but only if that person allows it to. And I have allowed this place to smush me. I officially unsmush myself.


Sure, I’m working at a grocery store part-time. A grocery store I love, that treats people right and provided free benefits and good options for good workers. I am learning to work at work again, to find my motivation, to be among the living while being paid essentially what I am paid here.

but I am also putting my art into the world, I am starting an etsy, I am performing a rock opera, I am freelance writing, I am poet mentoring, I am LIVING and I don’t need a big Daddy corporation to take care of me. The world is changing, work is changing and America has become a service-oriented culture. what service can I provide my community, my friends, my neighbors? Well I am surely not providing it here at a Christian publishing house. I am a creative free-spirited silly outspoken authentic artist and until I own that and live that I will be miserable and I will only bring those around me down. I am living for myself and for the betterment of the people around me.

Love to everyone and every living thing.

Throwing myself

Leap and the net will appear.
Does this work? We’ll see, I suppose. I am trying to put my 2 weeks notice in at work. But my current supervisor (only of the past few months when my boss left for Atlanta) is never in his office. Monday, he was out all day “waiting for the contractor” who never showed up. Yesterday he was out for a dental appointment. Today, it’s a different contractor issue and 10 am and he’s still not in. BLARGH!

But I have gotten a part-time job with Trader Joe’s (free benefits, yo!) and I’ll have the freedom to do workshops with Youth Speaks Nashville. My first workshop was with middle-schoolers on Monday. Inspiring kids to love and be creative with language on a regular basis is heaven to me. I felt absolutely magical afterwards. The writing exercise I gave them was so fun to read.

I am thinking of doing some personal archeology, taking it on as a project, with interviews and everything. After the writing group last year about ‘firsts’ I’ve really been interested in writing a memoir. I don’t know if anyone would want to read it but I’m of the ilk that if you need to write something you should rather than writing for an audience. I had a wicked crazy childhood, no sense in letting that story be forgotten.