There are eight men outside my office window sawing down a tree. The noise is sharpening all the Q-tips in my house into tiny white knives.These clowns have been cutting down trees all week. It's like listening to 100 dentists bore 100 cavities at once.
I'm half inclined to ask them if I can have a few logs for our outdoor fire pit, but I'm sure the City of St. Pete has loftier plans ... what with its stellar reputation for recycling.
It a spectacular day out. Gray. Rainy. Sky the color of a chalkboard. Perfect writing weather. It's not that bad weather inspires me to write, it's that the break in 75-degree monotonous sunshine triggers spirited introspection, which is such an ungrateful thing for a Buffalo girl to say, so my apologies to the folks back home.
Which brings me to my next tangent. Lately I've been fascinated by the human brain, in particular the day-to-day drudgery that is pierced by darts of distraction dipped in dopamine. What triggers these stabs of bliss and ambition? And why must they hit at the most inconvenient times?
Dopamine, just so we're clear, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical produced in our brains that serves as a lifeboat for neurons. When I picture dopamine, I picture ladies in Victorian dresses treading cold blue water in the North Atlantic as the Titanic sinks slowly in the distance. I picture a sea of dopamine carrying yellow lifeboats, and I picture bustle gowns like sensory neurons, billowing out under glacial water, desperate for a lifeboat, stockinged legs paddling dopamine like dendritic cellular projections.
When I picture our brain, I picture the globe. Divided into hemispheres, our brain is not unlike the earth. The frontal lobe is where most of our dopamine-sensitive neurons sit and stew, waiting patiently, hands clasped on their laps like southern belles at the Kentucky Derby, for a dopamine breeze to blow their hats off.
Often when we think of our brain's pleasure molecules, we think of serotonin. But in my not-so-expert opinion, serotonin is fleeting. Like a bite-sized Snickers. Dopamine however, seems more enduring. Like a gallon of chocolate ice cream.
Just the sound of the word dopamine is intoxicating. First discovered in 1952 by a Swedish scientist, (who by the way wasn't awarded his Nobel Prize for this discovery until 2000) dopamine is my enemy and my lover.
I drink dopamine every day in my coffee, and I know I could get it elsewhere if I wanted, but I tell myself to buck up, synthesize it on your own.
Which is why I'm throwing every ounce of literary ambition into a novel. I want to swim laps in a sea of dopamine. The last time I attempted a novel, I was so filled with dopamine it seeped out my eyes.
Dopamine, just so we're clear, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical produced in our brains that serves as a lifeboat for neurons. When I picture dopamine, I picture ladies in Victorian dresses treading cold blue water in the North Atlantic as the Titanic sinks slowly in the distance. I picture a sea of dopamine carrying yellow lifeboats, and I picture bustle gowns like sensory neurons, billowing out under glacial water, desperate for a lifeboat, stockinged legs paddling dopamine like dendritic cellular projections.
When I picture our brain, I picture the globe. Divided into hemispheres, our brain is not unlike the earth. The frontal lobe is where most of our dopamine-sensitive neurons sit and stew, waiting patiently, hands clasped on their laps like southern belles at the Kentucky Derby, for a dopamine breeze to blow their hats off.
Often when we think of our brain's pleasure molecules, we think of serotonin. But in my not-so-expert opinion, serotonin is fleeting. Like a bite-sized Snickers. Dopamine however, seems more enduring. Like a gallon of chocolate ice cream.
Just the sound of the word dopamine is intoxicating. First discovered in 1952 by a Swedish scientist, (who by the way wasn't awarded his Nobel Prize for this discovery until 2000) dopamine is my enemy and my lover.
I drink dopamine every day in my coffee, and I know I could get it elsewhere if I wanted, but I tell myself to buck up, synthesize it on your own.
Which is why I'm throwing every ounce of literary ambition into a novel. I want to swim laps in a sea of dopamine. The last time I attempted a novel, I was so filled with dopamine it seeped out my eyes.
--
PS. The picture is by Norbert Wu. It is not a Victorian bustle gown but the largest jellyfish in the Antarctic Circle. It was featured in TIME Magazine and published in Wu's 2004 book, Under Antarctic Ice.
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5 comments:
Now this post... this post dripped with imagery. I know just how you feel about the inspiration coming at the wrong time. I gave up on my fiction writing mostly because I could never stay inspired long enough to write something I was sure would be lucky to sit unpurchased at a Barnes & Noble some day, notched like an Alex Fletcher album as it collects dust and my tears.
Good luck. After three books (a novella, a book of poetry, and a short story collection), I am now looking forward to academic writing. Then at least I'll know no one is reading it, except those few souls who decide whether or not to publish it in the first place. Oh, and maybe a few more souls who see a flashy title like "Exogenous versus Indogenous Phenomena, a Study in Enivoronmental Factors and Response Mechanisms" and drool.
Thank you. It's so easy to fritter the day away writing blog posts about why I want to write a book as opposed to actually writing it.
Are you published? And Alex Fletcher? Are you referencing "Music and Lyrics?" A Hugh Grant rom-com?
Yes, I was referencing Music & Lyrics. I love movies like that. He has some particularly great lines in that movie, in fact.
I self-published my first two books (one in high school, in one college) and for my third book Italked to a professional self-publishing company with the ability to market to the big box stores (they helped Richard Paul Evans get his start, for instance), but I decided not to go through with it. I have some novel ideas tucked away on some archive folder of one of my computers somewhere, but I've never moved forward with them. I've enjoyed reading the thoughts of Orson Scott Card on how to write and what good writers need to do, and I've realized it's just not for me. Certainly not right now. I'm not committed enough to making it a great, real story. Not yet, anyway.
So, for now, my biggest accolade is that one of my poems has been used at least three times to propose to women. And no, none of them was my own wife.
"So, for now, my biggest accolade is that one of my poems has been used at least three times to propose to women. And no, none of them was my own wife."
This was the beautiful and clever thing I read today.
Thanks. Turning a phrase isn't so hard. Turning three hundred pages out for someone else to admire is another thing entirely.
One of these days my wife and I might write our story as a novel. But it would have to come out under her name. I can't have students (in the future) thinking I'm a softy so they can slack off in my class.
They have to figure that out on their own.
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