Yes, I have ulterior motives for writing this musing. I drew another monster and I couldn’t bear to put two doodles back to back. Instead, I decided to take what I wrote earlier, pile on additional crap, and call it filler between doodles. (I have no idea why the phrase “filler between doodles” reminded me of Drakes Cakes’ Devil Dogs and Yodels—it must be the chalky white creamy filling and the chocolate cake.)

The ringing hasn’t stopped all day.

I need to find routine. Routine breeds habit. Habit creates success. Wow, I should write self-help books. It’s late in the day and I’m pounding out words in the hope of finding something worthwhile to talk about. Random thoughts are better than those planned ones. Too bad I can’t turn random thoughts into coherent stories. At least not yet.

As an exercise, Doolies went through my Doodles list and picked the ones she thought I created using random scribbles as opposed to those I created by planning before putting stylus to pad. She hit them all except one: she doesn’t like my Lady in Scene doodle—which is one of my favorite—and therefore claimed it was planned. It wasn’t. Just random lines and a random chick I threw in at the last moment after the monster I drew for the scene disappointed me. I’m trying to find a way to translate my random bad doodles to random bad writing. This harkens back to a time before I knew anything about this writing thing where I thought I’d sit back, type words, and read the stories as my fingers typed them. That was before I realized that writing required work. I guess I’m still looking for the easy way to read my own writing.

It’s less a ringing than an incessant beeping. It might come from the server room across the hall. Even with my door closed and the music pumping through my tinny computer speakers, I can still sense the beeping, like the heartbeat under the floor in that murderer’s story. It’s not that I’m feeling guilty so much as . . . my concentration keeps slipping into the metronomic beeps.

Part of the random drawing that appeals to me is that the editor is mostly turned off. I’ve explained this before, but since I’m trying to fill up space, I’ll explain it again. After drawing a closed shape (for the dragon above, the head and body was the random scribble I started with), I rotate the shape and push and pull out the lines until I see something. Once I figure out what it is, I start adding the details and applying the paint and textures (mostly cheap Illustrator effects). The critic is mostly quiet until I’m finished, leaving me in this free space where I’m judging not the quality of the lines but the steps necessary to improve the aesthetics of the shape, to see something in it, like the process of stories in clouds or stars. Now, if only I can take this and translate it into my writing—if only I could lose myself in writing as I lose myself in drawing squiggly lines.

So here I am with the random writings. I’m putting finger to keys and not worrying about where it takes me. There should be lots of silence, and I’m okay with silence. That’s the one thing I’m good at in life: quiet. In the (great) movie, “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the protagonist talks about the ‘dining dead,’ those couples that you see in restaurants eating their food in silence, long having exhausted all topics of conversation. One of his fears was to be in a relationship where he joined the ranks of the dining dead. I’m not too concerned about that. In fact, I embrace silence, much preferring the quiet to the inane small talk that most people fill it with (see the wonderful article Caring For Your Introvert).

My mother visited this weekend with the Doolies, and in our alone time, I think my mother misunderstood my silences. It’s not that I don’t love her—for I do—it’s just that when I have nothing to say, I tend to say nothing. It’s not a sign of boredom so much as a defense mechanism against irritation related to small talk. I don’t know what it is about small talk, but when I’m not in the mood to participate (and it’s very rare that I am in the mood), I tend to kill conversations before they get started. Another part of NEQID I need to work on, I guess.

Now, if this were a story, the beeping would turn into something, like a countdown to a bomb that goes kabloomy at the end of the story. There. I did it. I made something happen. Or, I should have said, I thought of something to happen, since this isn’t a story and nothing blew up, and this is just my random words thrown onto random beeps that have no relation to what I’m writing about. Isn’t it grand when you have nothing to say but want to type up words so you can say you wrote something between two doodles?

The final episodes of Buffy waits for me, along with a wonderful leftover steakhouse dinner. I should go to it. When I threw down the first set of these words, I feared that the exercise would end in the draft sitting in the dredges of my computer, never published, never shared with the world. I wondered if this would be a bad thing, if most of these words—and here I even threw in the self-deprecating aside, “okay, all of these words”—were meaningless and senseless and didn’t have much in the way of value for anything. And then I went on about the beeping. Well, I wasn’t wrong, as Buffy, or I should say Joss Whedon, would say. But I guess with all the beeping and doodling random-like and comfortable PWAs, I guess I did manage to throw down almost a thousand words. Now, imagine next time if my words actually said something.

Beep.