Friday morning (payday)...

The Town Common is hidden by fog and the view from my work window, out over the roof toward the old colonial square, could very well be the view from the pilot house of a lazy fishing trawler; the view forward over the bow, on the stillest of grey days somewhere in the North Atlantic...

The stillness draws me in, and my mind idles along with the hum of the fluorescent tubes above. Today, I have to design the company Christmas card and I have no ideas. The scene out my window, with the skeletal tree limbs rising up from the mist like masts, conjures images of ghost ships moving through the fog, of the Flying Dutchman with tattered rigging and sails; not of season's greetings, boughs of holly and customer loyalty. I want to make a card, NOT of Jolly St. Nick�, but of fearsome Blackbeard, Edward Teach, the Anti-Santa; emerging on his galley from out of the fog bank / descending upon his hapless prey / reeking of rum / wreaking havoc / smoldering cannon wicks tethered to his frightening hair / firing broadsides... Happy Holidays! - Prepare to be boarded and accept gifts... Ye Scurvy Dogs!!

Nothing, not even a double espresso, can dislodge this massive creative block. Feeling as though I have no control, I begin to read...

I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however incomplete, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought. I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether. All this, which is very badly expressed, threatens to introduce a dangerous ambiguity into your judgement of me...

- Antonin Artaud - letter to Jacques Rivi�re, June 5, 1923.

The fog is lifting, the sails are stowed away, and I begin to resolve the quaint houses lining the village green and the warm scene of Whoville taking shape on my monitor.

RIP, George
...the farther one travels, the less one knows.