I know a woman who married a tall, charming, athletic man a few decades back.  He was a salesman, and something of a bullshit artist.   He exuded self-confidence and threw money around to impress his guests, but occasionally he would stutter.  His stutter did not stop him from being very opinionated, very assertive, arguing forcefully for opinions gleaned from his wide reading.  His stutter did nothing to curb his road rage.

 I once saw him strike out in a softball game and throw his bat down in frustration.  He was a giant and almost shattered the bat on the hard dirt near home plate.  Next time up he popped up, put his head down and groaned in frustration.  His groan could be heard on the other side of the park.   The third time up he hit a monstrous drive that kept rising as it went, and it went further than any ball I’ve ever seen hit in a softball game.  He went into his homerun trot smiling.

The woman fought with him, and dominated him in many ways, but they clearly loved each other.  He loved her so much he kept buying her cowboy boots, at one time she had a dozen pairs.  Their daughter would later have two dozen Barbie dolls.  He was a high roller.  He left 40% tips if he liked the service.  Then things started going badly for him.  Over time his stories of bad luck stopped making sense.

For example, he had a very lucrative sales job, working on a small crew of salesmen who sold a product that flew off the shelves.  He was friends with the many store owners on his route, they often gave him hardcover books, current best sellers.  There was no reason to think this friendly salesman was putting the books in his case when the store owner was distracted writing him a check for the goods he delivered.  He was loved at work, one of their top earners and a bright guy with a great sense of humor who could make fun of himself.  Everyone believed him when he reported that his sample case had been stolen from his car.  Why would anyone sell his samples for a few hundred bucks when he was taking home so much money?

Once he came home with his clothes cut to ribbons by razors, his wallet and house keys stolen.  He’d pulled off the FDR to avoid a massive traffic jam and two crackheads had tried to carjack him on an East Harlem side street.  He reported they were each as big as him and had eyes like sharks.  He’d managed to fight them off, being hit by a 2 X 4 in the process and amazingly not going down, they got his wallet and house keys, but he managed to hold on to the car keys and drive home.  He was black and blue, his clothes sliced to ribbons, but otherwise OK.  Nobody will ever know what actually happened to him that day, though one suspects a gambling debt was involved.

He eventually was fired from the lucrative sales job when his second sample case was stolen from his trunk, and samples began showing up on the shelves of stores on his route.  He managed to talk his way back into the job, but was reassigned to a very slow territory and his sales, and income, plummeted.  The woman found out they had zero left in the bank, and very little coming in, and with a new baby in the picture she was very stressed out.

He eventually lost that job, had others, progressively less lucrative, lost them too, usually following the discovery of some petty embezzlement scheme he cooked up.   Each scheme had two characteristics in common: they netted a few hundred dollars at a time and they were designed in a way that guaranteed he would get caught.   My personal favorite is one I will relate in a moment.

The woman eventually realized that he was a person who was handy with an untruth if it suited the situation better than candor.  It took years, but eventually she came to see him as a liar.  The final proof came as they were house hunting, a couple of years after the birth of their second child, a son.  When she was pregnant with the boy she reported that her husband wanted another child “as much as he wants testicular cancer”.   Once the boy was born it was love all around for everyone.  They were going to put a down payment down on a house the woman loved, they were done negotiating and were ready to buy it.  He borrowed ten thousand dollars from his wife’s parents on a Monday, part of the money they were going to put down to buy the house.  Later that week he informed everyone that he’d declared bankruptcy on Wednesday.

The woman went into a rage, and a panic, and stopped sleeping and lost a lot of weight, she could not keep food down.  For a variety of reasons she didn’t leave him, though she slept with her young son for several years and actively hated her husband.

Fast forward several years and we are at my personal favorite story about this guy.  He was coaching his son’s basketball team with another guy, and they got to talking about the shit work the guy was obliged to take these days to pay his bills.  The other coach had a commercial extermination business and offered his new friend a sales job.  The pay was better than what he was making, he would be working for a friend, and the friend’s company was flourishing.

A big source of income was commissions for landing new accounts.  The first few months he opened a few accounts a week and he was taking home good money.  Then it became harder and harder to find new businesses that needed exterminator services.  He could not let his wife and children down, so he hit on another brilliant scheme.  

Trusted by his friend, he would often lock up the office at the end of the day, he had his own key.   Ignorant about the workings of computers, he managed to pull up accounts and change the details, making up new clients he’d pretend he’d signed up.  He would print out the new client information sheet, turn it in the next day, and his friend would slap him on the back and pay him a commission.

The only problem was, in order to create a new fake account to get a commission for, he was inadvertently deleting actual accounts.  He’d overwrite company A’s file on the computer, renaming it company X.  He didn’t know how to copy a file and retain the original, so an actual client was deleted each time he overwrote the file to create a new commission.   The scheme worked perfectly, for several weeks, until the deleted companies started calling in to complain.

“Hey, Dave, what the hell’s going on?  I’ve got waterbugs marching out into the waiting room, carrying away small dogs,” reported a disgruntled veterinarian, “I haven’t seen you guys in a month.  What the fuck, Dave?”

Dave was sincerely perplexed, checked his computer, did not find the vet’s account.  Once this happened a few times Dave figured out what happened and angrily fired his unethical buddy.

The man went home to his wife that Friday and sadly reported that Dave’s business was having a slump, and that Dave had to let three sales people go, and since he was the last one hired, he was the first one on the chopping block.  His wife was all sympathy, took him to dinner, then a movie, reassured him that everything would turn out OK.  She took him to the beach the next day, the family had a wonderful weekend.  She had finally completely recovered from her rage against him.

Until Monday when Dave had calmed himself down enough to call the wife.  He reported the crime, and how much he was hurt by the betrayal, and told her he was going to press criminal charges unless the $3,600 was paid back immediately.   They made a payment plan and the woman began paying her husband’s debt weekly out of her meager salary.

I urged her to finally tell her children the truth about their father’s treachery, otherwise she would appear once more irrationally angry at him and the kids would be rightly confused.  Honesty was the only light to be shined on this hideous situation, and she agreed.  Declining my help (I’d known them all for years and have had training as a mediator) she assured me that he himself had promised to tell the kids what he’d done.  I was skeptical.

When the big day came he put on a sad face and sincerely told the children: “you know, sometimes people make mistakes.  And, as you know, your mother has a hard time forgiving people, particularly me….”  At this the woman screamed, ran out of the house and began driving 90 mph on the highway.  To this day, I’m pretty sure, her children have no idea why she is often enraged at their father.  The father, after all, is an affectionate, playful, easy-going guy who takes things in stride.  Their mother, by contrast, is a demanding and stressed out nervous wreck who is often cranky and who treats their loving father very badly much of the time.

Now, we fast forward to the present.  The kids are both young adults, the daughter just graduated from college, the son on his way to college.  Lovely kids, and both quite brilliant, good looking and well-liked.

The man is now crippled with multiple disc and joint problems.  He can no longer stand or walk without pain.  He had to give up his off-the-books job delivering pizza, he can no longer drive or carry the bags and boxes to and from his van.  Pain killers do not seem to help, and he moans in pain as, after a long day at work, the woman waits on him, does the laundry, empties the dishwasher, brings him water, the TV remote, his book, his reading glasses.  He groans throughout the night.  This once muscular 240 pound athlete is now a shattered 300 pound albatross who has not left the house in a month.  He hangs heavily from his wife’s neck, and it is up to their son to tell the man not to groan all night, that he must not keep his wife awake and endanger the hardworking breadwinner’s livelihood.

I tell the story because, having heard it, and felt the weight of it on the woman, and the almost mythic proportions of it, it becomes impossible not to tell it to somebody.  

Saw Sekhnet’s cousins last night.  Alan, a friendly man who describes himself as a pussycat, was beaming.   He had good news, finally being laid off from a lucrative and easy job he was trying to leave for years, with a nice severance package.  He’s 70, has plenty of money and investments and doesn’t need to work anyway.  He grinned from ear to ear as he laid out the details of his new freedom.  After a nice dinner Alan dropped us off at the nearby ferry.  As soon as we were in the car he laid on us the heavy medical news he’d just received.

Thinking of his beaming face at dinner in light of the scary news he related afterwards reminded me of a series of photos of me taken the mid 1980s.  Those photos are on two facing pages of an album my mother put together, now in my sister’s house.  In each photo I am beaming, looking happier than I ever remember being.  When I first came across these photos a few years back I was at a loss for why I looked so deliriously happy in each photo, posed with my arm around somebody, or putting my widely grinning face close to their’s for the photo.  

I did some figuring and realized with shock when they had been taken.  During a winter I was incapacitated by what felt like a deep depression.  The experts I saw diagnosed it as something called Dysthymia, which, years later when l read about it on the internet, told me they were at a loss to diagnose this sudden several month long bout of darkness and paralysis.  It disappeared as suddenly as it arrived, after six months or so, never to reappear in anywhere near that intensity or for very long.  

Dysthymia, for diagnostic purposes, is supposed to persist for  at least two years, with only minor interruptions in the generally depressed state of this chronic illness.  Dysthymia, we are told, lasts a lifetime and can only be mitigated, it would seem, by a lifelong regimen of various pharmaceuticals that inhibit the, dig it, reuptake of serotonin.

Our minds, moods and personalities are still in most ways mysteries.   I think of that beaming smile, which fools most of the people most of the time, and what a flimsy umbrella it actually is.

There are several forces that can choke creativity to death, but probably its most ruthless foe is a ticking clock set for a very short time frame.

“Ready, set…. create! You have twenty minutes to be creative, then we’re back on the clock: go, go, go!!!!”

In a situation like this the most musical sound you are likely to hear is the loud, rhythmic ticking of the clock counting down the minutes until creative time is over and you are back to the workaday drill. Young children can probably salvage something in this short burst of time, they are not bound by practical cultural imperatives as adults are, not yet daunted by seeming logical impossibility. A disciplined adult might write a tight paragraph or two in fifteen or twenty minutes, or play something nice on a piano or think up something new. But for most others, that tiny window to do something creative won’t be one they can leap through very productively. Just as they enter the creative zone, that free play place where most creative people report that time disappears, time will be called and it’s back to reality.

For one thing, as the clock goes from 20 to 19 to 15 minutes to 9, pressure is building. Pressure is the enemy of imagination. Time is required for the mind to unwind and the imagination to uncurl and stretch itself. Imagination takes its time, cannot be summoned instantly like a genie from a bottle. A short period of unwinding must be allowed for.

The rest of the world must be allowed to recede before the mind unwinds to dream up things that don’t already exist. This takes time. It can take 20 minutes or more for the distractions to dissipate enough for the relaxation necessary for inventive play to set in, and then at least an hour is needed for that play to be of good use. Only an undistracted, relaxed person can think and act creativity. In this world of a million constant distractions, it takes time for the rippling pond of the mind to calm itself.

It’s true that many creative thoughts happen in an instant, when we are doing other things– the aha moment stepping into the shower, the missing puzzle piece appearing out of nowhere as we chop firewood. The brain is ingenious this way, because creativity and problem solving are native to us, but I am talking about setting a period to do creative work. You must not be stingy when you do this.

Thought experiment: you live a pressured life with a hundred nagging responsibilities every day. When you are not actually ticking off tasks you are worrying about tomorrow’s list, which is bad, but not as bad as the list for the following day, or next Tuesday’s. You make room on your calendar for a twenty minute session of playing your neglected musical instrument. To do this in good conscience you must first squeeze in three additional tasks, saving the remaining ten for after your little play session. Imagine the music you might improvise under those conditions.

We live in a highly pressurized, competitive society where most of us are judged on how hard we work and how much money we make. If you are born, like Thomas Jefferson, booted and spurred, etc., you can be judged on the quality of the luck you worked hard to create, but few are born having worked hard enough in the womb to emerge attended by 300 slaves. Even so, Jefferson was undeniably a prolifically creative man. If you are not born super-rich, your life is usually spent in the practical pursuit of usefulness and making money.

Creativity, unless it brings an income, is reserved for day dreamers and idlers. That I can easily be seen as both of these at the moment leaves me in a distressed state of mind sometimes. I find myself tormented by the simple fact: unless you monetize your creation very few will understand what you have been wasting your time doing. Unmonetized creativity, no matter how otherwise cool that creation may be, is– say it with me: failure and a source of shame.

I picture an immensely talented little girl who two decades ago sat at her grandmother’s upright piano and began playing two handed classical music by ear. I can see her little left hand, it was like those water bucket carrying brooms from the Sorcercer’s Apprentice scene in Fantasia. The left hand was animated, relentless, moving in perfect time, of its own accord, and continued to keep perfect time as the little girl looked at me over her shoulder and beamed. “And look, you can play this one too!” and she played another classical melody as the left hand kept playing its part perfectly. Then she played a third classical tune over the still uninterrupted bass line.

Fast forward– or better yet, don’t. Let’s keep the focus right there. The six year-old was not imagining herself on stage at Carnegie Hall, or cashing the check for playing at Carnegie Hall. She was not picturing her face on the poster, on the album cover. She was certainly not thinking of the clock, or what she might have to do next. She was in awe, splashing happily in a joyous torrent, connecting herself without any self-consciousness to a deep human longing, magically coaxing life, melody, beat and danceable music from an inanimate object.

“Yes, but the six year-old did not understand that she was not actually coaxing magical life out of that piano, she was merely discovering the musical/mathematical discoveries already made by other very talented people, Mozart, Beethoven and so forth. Remarkable, perhaps, that she could do this without knowing how to read music, OK, I’ll give you that. Good for her that her left hand could play so independently and so steadily– a real talent, OK, we’ll give you that too. But I hardly think, you know, this is just so typical of the way you try to build your ‘case’. I say, I say, blah blah blah,” says the predictable voice of the world.

There is no market for what I’m selling so far, or, more precisely, I haven’t found a way to market it yet. Our free market (as those who profit most from the system have romantically named it) is run according to the bottom line. What you can sell has value, clearly. What you dream about, unless monetized, is only a dream. We all like to dream, yes, of course, but better to dream of creating something of tangible value than of building play castles in the clouds. It may seem a shame that our culture is the way it is, to someone who likes to waste their time dreaming of things as they wish they were instead of logically fitting their creativity to what is marketable… I say, I say: blah blah blah.

Forget for a moment the arguable shame of a culture that puts a price on everything and discards whatever can’t be sold for a profit. Forget you are reading the words of a man who swims, ranting on the strenuous out breaths, against the current of the mercantile world we live in. Forget that most people simply don’t have the luxury of 20 minutes to unwind before spending an hour being creative, or any real desire to abstractly create in the first place.

Remember this — there is nothing to lament if you’re unable to think creatively if you don’t give yourself time to let life’s pressures fall away for ninety minutes or so once in a while. Creativity may be an abstraction that means little to you, it seems to mean little to most people. That’s perfectly fine. But if you mean to be creative, remember to give yourself enough time to unwind and let the world of other demands turn hazy and fade away, before you fault yourself for a lack of creativity.