Creativity

After a good email chat with Ryan today, it began to dawn on me how I often feel held back. I have all these - I'm not gonna say "good ideas" because they might be shit to everyone else, but I have all these ideas, and something prevents me from seeing them through to fruition. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming other people here. I'm blaming circumstance. Circumstance, and my lack of ability to express what I want to express. Some examples to give you a clue...

I've had, rattling round in this empty tin can of a head, an idea for a comedy animation. The beautiful Catherina Zeta Jones, and the sultry Charlotte Church, just chilling out on a TV sofa, the kind of sofa chat king Parkinson himself would be jealous of. They're sitting and they're talking. It's a very basic animation, just badly scanned newspaper images of them (maybe with a few creases, who knows?!) with their bottom jaws cut away, jerking up and down, oscillating manically to the sound of their voices.

Except it's my voice. I'm not putting on a woman voice - I care not to imitate what I'd sound like if my balls were crushed. It's just me, but with a Welsh accent. A slightly deeper tone than the Darling Bud of May herself. "Hello, I'm Catherine Zeta Jones and I'd like to tell you about the benefits of being with an older man, but first here's my old mate Charlotte Church..."

Then it's me again, but much deeper and with a stronger Welsh accent. "Hello, I'm Charlotte Church and I've got the voice of an angel".

See? I told you the ideas weren't good! But they're there and that's what counts.

I only ever have this idea when I'm at work. I somehow manage to leave it in my desk drawer when I exit the building in the evenings. So when I'm there and I really want to actually create this monstrosity, I'm either stuck in the middle of an 86 page HTML tedium-a-thon of a document conversion, or I'm attempting to fix an online library that nobody gives two shits and a fuck about. Circumstance hits me for 450 shadow damage. That bastard.

On the rare occasions that I'm ahead with my work and have time to make this kind of stuff, old lady circumstance seems to have hidden all the microphones, eaten all our newspapers and taken a piss on the one, lonely USB cobweb-collecting scanner we treasured long ago.

So, project two. I'll create some nice street art, maybe animate it a little, use it on the website to entice unsuspecting NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) young people into accidentally clicking on our careers section, and inadvertantly getting a job. But oooh no. It seems Captain Talent isn't fighting crime today. No, he's gone on a romantic holiday to Hawaii with his wife, and he's enjoying it so much that he doesn't think he'll ever return to do battle with the untalented hands of Daddy Foss. He's never really wanted to contort my fingers into such a way that they suddently become artistic. He's too busy shagging his missus and downing Margheritas to help me spill my imagination onto Wacom tablet.

Oh what I'd give for some raw, artistic talent like James has. And what I'd give to not feel completely drained after a day of work, so that I might be able practice and improve.

Music is the same! Occasionally I get into a writing mood, and my shit filter is graced with a shimmering gem, but that gem still has shit all over it. It needs to be cleaned up before I can present it to the public, in a nice gold surround finished off with a light silver chain that you can hang around your neck.

That only happens with the lyrics. When it comes to musical composition, I'm about as good as the wooden fence that seperates Lisa Riley from a thousand gallons of clotted cream.

I think up tunes in my head. I do it almost all the time, and they're good. In my head. Can my fingers (yes, it's those retarded digits again) express these mental patterns melodically? No fucking way. I've got more chance of copping a threesome with Kylie and Ms Portman.

So kiddies... If you have some talent, be it with drawing, composing, skating or even something pointless and wasteful like politics, don't squander it. Please try to realise your potential. There are people like us, good people like me and Ryan, that wish for ability and opportunity, and are deprived at least one of these important ingredients.

Well, at least tonight I don't have writers block!

Incidentally, if either of you the two aforementioned lovely ladies (Kylie and Natalie, not Me and Ryan) are reading this, drop me an email and we'll get something arranged.