From my phone, while watching my nine year old hula hoop in the back yard, I was just now able to search my archive of more than 9,000 mixed media notes (in Evernote, of course), quickly find my grandmother’s 1965 job application, copy and paste its text into an email to both my dad and my aunt, requesting clarifications on certain items relevant to my chronology (in development now through the end of October, at which point I’m going to take another stab at NaNoWriMo), all the while: 1) listening to Elliott Smith tracks on the same phone, via bluetooth connection to the speakers my husband recently set up in the backyard shed, and 2) Exchanging text messages with my best friend in North Carolina, relevant to solidifying next week’s travel plans, which (you KNEW there’d be a Twitter connection, right?) is scheduled to happen in advance of finally meeting a few awesome folks I have thus far only encountered via the Internet.
The book I’m writing, The Road to Hell, is the most enormous undertaking of my life (after, you know, helping my girlfriend of 1992-1997 to go underground from exceedingly well organized former pimps). But it’s doable, now. I have both the will and the technology to organize all my unwieldy material, which spans decades, and to make good use of it, finally.
Have I ever allowed technology to simply distract me, rather than actually help me to get important, life-defining work done? Of course (and chronically). But I’ve turned a corner with all that recently. By virtue of finally having adequate tools with which to capture, clarify and finally use for substantive creative work all my otherwise problematic multitudes, I am feeling just about unstoppable. And that feeling has been a really long time coming.
(Oh hey, gotta make a phone call with this little device now. I know, right? The damned thing even makes PHONE CALLS!)
