The year was 1995, a mere twenty-nine years ago when I was but an overgrown child of forty-six. Recently divorced and settling into my new digs in Berkeley, the universe bestowed a large (relatively speaking) chunk of money on me: a modest advance from a publisher for my novel Ruby & Spear and eye-popping option money for the movie rights to my novel Forgotten Impulses. Thus ended a decade of month-to-month barely squeaking by, and thus began a couple years of having sufficient funds to work on my writing and music full time.
To celebrate this joyful turn of events, I purchased a few things I’d always wanted: a writing table, a dining table, and a medium-sized green vase. Not far from the house I rented in Berkeley was a woodshop specializing in furniture made from recycled lumber, and in their little storefront I found the writing table of my dreams and the expandable dining table of my dreams, both made of reclaimed pine. The dining table is our dining table to this day, and the writing table is the subject of this missive. I found a marvelous green vase a few weeks after moving to Berkeley and it is still our go-to vase for fleurs from the garden here in Mendocino.
Unbeknownst to me, I arrived in Berkeley during the last year of rent control and so was able to rent my old three-bedroom house for 1100 dollars a month. A year later the dot.com revolution exploded in synch with the demise of rent control, at which time my house would have rented for 4000 dollars a month. Fortunately I was grandfathered in and my rent could not be increased. So I was able to stay there.
I let one of my bedrooms to a series of housemates, one of the bedrooms became my office/guestroom, and the third bedroom was my bedroom. The new writing table became the centerpiece of my office, and for my first two years in Berkeley I used my writing table for… writing.
Then money became scarce, I became the sole support of two needy dependents, and the days of month-to-month squeaking by resumed. And ere long the writing table became a storage area rather than a writing surface.
As I’m sure you are aware, any flat surface elevated a few feet off the ground is a magnet for mail, bills, glasses, wallets, earplugs, postal scales, computers, printers, car keys, flashlights, guitar picks, pens, pencils, dishes, mugs, sheets of paper, scraps of paper, silverware, half-eaten cookies, snapshots, cameras, phones, statuary, rocks, driftwood, lip balm, address books, change jars, crystals, and bowls of sage, to name but a fraction of the things we humans collect and stack on flat surfaces (and on top of each other.) It’s just how we are. I’m sure this propensity to stack things on elevated flat surfaces is genetic.
Near the end of my eleven-year stay in Berkeley, my mother died and I inherited enough money to make the move to Mendocino and rent a place where I could start anew and use the surface of my writing table for writing and drawing again, which I did for a while, and I was glad.
Then my old iMac died and I got a new one with a long bubble backside (strange design) that was so long the only surface in my office wide enough to accommodate the thing was my beloved writing table. As I’m sure you know, a computer of any size, let alone a big bulbous one, immediately and thoroughly negates the beauty and spaciousness and je ne sais quoi of a good writing table. Yet despite the warnings and pleas from my higher self, I surrendered my writing table to the elongated computer and made do with other surfaces for writing.
Then twelve years ago Marcia and I bought our house in which we each have an office studio, and in my new office I gave my newer and less bulbous iMac domain over a standing desk and freed my writing table to be a spacious writing surface once more.
However, my office is not large, and having recently launched my career as a self-publisher and self-music producer, the office and writing table soon became functionaries of a laughably inefficient shipping operation in which my writing table assumed the identity of a multi-layered quagmire of easy-to-misplace and easy-to-overlook and easy-to-forget stuff.
I did my longhand writing on the dining table or I sat in chairs writing on a clipboard, and for the last twelve years my table desk has been a clutter hell, a stack of woe, a mechanism of self-sabotage.
Looking back over my life, psychoanalytically speaking, I can recall many Large Instances of Self-Sabotage, many Lesser Instances of Self-Sabotage, and myriad Minor Instances of Self-Sabotage. Large instances include teaming up with negative, critical partners who undermined me at every turn, drinking too much coffee, and going barefoot on nail-infested construction sites. Lesser Instances include waiting too long to fill the gas tank and running out on a remote highway during a tempest, renting a room in my house to a psychic leech, and eating too much popcorn in one sitting. Minor instances include tripping over shoes I should have put away and leaving the door open so clouds of mosquitoes come into the house.
But perhaps worse than those instances of self-sabotage identifiable after-the-fact are Unconscious Instances of Self-Sabotage, one of which is rendering the heart, if you will, of my creative process unusable by covering my wonderful writing table with detritus that should never be put there, and certainly not left there for days and weeks and months and, yes, years!
Also psychoanalytically speaking, while acknowledging that some percentage of mess-making can be blamed on human nature, I think it important to acknowledge that most self-sabotaging behavior is LEARNED. And here’s the thing about Unconscious Self-Sabotage; though I (We) may have consciously decided not to emulate my (our) profoundly neurotic parents, and in many ways we have been successful in not emulating them, they are still inside us influencing our neurological operating systems. Yes they are.
Only eternal vigilance can keep us from repeating behavior our primary caretakers relentlessly modeled for our wildly receptive psyches throughout the formative years of our childhoods.
Now that I no longer sell books or music CDs from my web site, and my office is no longer a shipping depot, I finally got around to making my writing table a table for writing again. Hurray!
I hereby vow to strive to keep my writing table free of stuff that shouldn’t be there. I know there will be setbacks in the days and weeks ahead (there are already minor incursions underway) but for now I have tasted the fruits of clearing the boards, and those fruits are sweet and nutritious and fill me with joy.
fin
Todd and Marcia’s music is gettable from Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, etc. Copies of many of Todd’s books are orderable from your favorite actual bookstores and many online book sources. E-books editions are available from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, and Todd’s fabuloso audio books are available from Apple Books and Audible.