Rerouting Writer's Block

It's not like me to have writer's block, least of all on a Saturday night when I should be doing far less productive things. You would think that the slightly rebellious thrill of not going out in a rancid rich college town like this would be enough to send me leaping into the barricades of linguistic productivity: not so. After 4 or 5 failed attempts, I figure the only way I'll post something tonight (as is my sorta-goal for this year, much as it was for last: write something every day, even if it forcefully consumes eggs with a slurping sound) is my tackling the issue head-on. I am bored, and my writing bores me. Writing itself bores me. What does not bore me is reading, and I've been doing a lot of it: Corey Doctorow, David Foster Wallace, Dan Simmons, Joan Didion: these people are pros. What right have I to even open my mouth in this global party where the most literate get to write for food money, and I should be content combining color-shapes and word-forms in Adobe Illustrator?

Anyways... writing. What's it all about? I sometimes fancy myself a sci-fi writer, and I can often and easily fall into the laziness of sci-fi mindset: improvise as you go, drop a lot of gadget names and unexpected combinations, and profile characters with strange, inhuman motivations and ways of speaking and methods of building super-shacks to live in (see, I just did it: "super-shacks"). Sometimes I write in order to feed myself with "intuition nutrition", the feeling you get when a written piece just "clicks", when you are writing what feels right, and not just what you think you ought to. I often feel that I ought to live up to my reputation of a "New Age Hunter S. Thompson", applying my wacky forebrain skills to the remote disciplines of Central Colorado: yoga, odd diets, Dianetics, collisions of meditation and praying and intentions and the color purple-aqua and all the rest. It would be so easy to lambast crystals, to mock incense, to complain about incense and to compose odds to the shit/foot odor smell of musty old meditation cushions (or is it beans? fiber-foam? Rice crystals? Yogurt condensation).

But parodizing the New Age is too easy, not to mention pointless. These people are, more or less, harmless, and they're not hurting anybody, and it's... well, too easy. Way too easy (have a I said that enough?). Besides, there's a certain wisdom to the old saw of "reconnecting with your body", and it's something the sci-fi/post-cyberpunk/super mega whatever writers don't do enough of. Doctorow is brilliant, of course, but his humane extrapolations of post-scarcity economics and file sharing and online gaming and the techno-singularity and nanoboticals -- while entertaining -- leave one with the sort of arid impression of: "well, cool idea.. now what?"

It's that "now what?" that drives me. The sci-fi writers live way up high in there heads, refusing to touch the ground, whereas the "literary" writers -- those neo-realists who place soulfullness and pretty descriptions of places and really believable (read: safe) human interactions as their raison d'etre -- are all too grounded. What, I wonder, might be a hybridized trans-alternatiive be? Must sci-fi be so much about downloaded consciousness and instantaneous space-travel and AI run amok in the souls of the continentally resigned?

I've often thought that missing ingredient for post-Snow Crash science fiction should be esoterism (see above list), but now I'm not so sure. It seems like the true future poetics are not to be found in technological extrapolation, nor twinkling re-imaginations of mystico-magical systems and forethought: sometimes I think it's in the roots of trees.

Let me explain.

What seems (and I can only say this based on my limited readings within the genre) to get overlooked in these heady days of WiFi file-sharing reputation economics is another, also-hyped hi-tech strand: bioengineering. Rather than the continuation of this arid screens-and-keyboards hypermediated name-dropping culture, I wonder if the direction we're headed in is something more orc-like: fusion with the trees, a download into plant consciousness, a rewiring of our priorities to take in the sensate limitations and extended ultra-dull lifespans of our vascular cousins.

Lest one think I'm getting all Terrence McKenna on ya'll, let's extrapolate this further. Any psychedelic notion of "hidden realities" or "ulterior forces" is henceforth boring -- just as rocket-finned spaceships and psychic transponders and memetic gene-shufflers. Instead, we look for our speculations in the ultra-mundane, in the things so beneath our vision that they (the things) would do well to plot an ambush. I'm talking about parking lots, sewer drains, the road gravel left behind by melted dirty snow. I'm talking about soda cans for god's sake.

But this is not a call-to-arms for "fiction about recycling": I take energy from the hyperstitional frenzoid idea of "hooking up with the physiosphere. The iron molecules in my body are calling out for the earth's liquid molten core: maybe it's time to heed that whisper.

Indeed, it is suchly the case that both the New Age hoo-dooery and the sci-fi buzzflashing lead me cold and dead, as does the hope that the aforementioned lots and drains will come to wake me in the night with their plans and conspiracies. The slogan I've taken on from now on is "if it can be defined, it bores me", and I pine to write myself into the corners where I haven't a clue what I'm doing, and am just as mystified (without being confused, I should point out) as the reader is. Life is a great mystery, which the New Agers and sci-fi folks take great pride in attempting to debunk (whether it's by going within, or going forward, respectively) by their delineation of coherent narratives and prophesies.

But it ain't like that, but nor is it a confusing chaos-jumble of shifts and fluctuation: those are all definitions and defined, but what I want to write is: