Return of the Dragon Lady

For the last two years that this blog has been going, it’s written on a Mac laptop. If you’ve ever seen the Mac ads with Justin Long personifying a Mac computer and some uptight dude a PC and you read this space, you might have a picture of the author. Ironically, the Coffee blog was started to fill the void left when my favourite bookshop closed after eleven years.

A Different View was where I came into my own. It was the shop that gave me the freedom to process and grow; the books, conversations and most of all, friendships were a huge part of my life. When the owner decided that her life needed to take another path, many of us, though happy for her, were left wondering, what next? The happy, loud Saturday limes with Stuart, Richard, Adele and the other transients who came and went were the mainstay of our week; it was here that ideas got tossed around, we talked about everything under the sun and explored our creativity. It was our home away from home. Two years later we still have not found a place to call our own and have resorted to e-mails, phone calls, gallery crawling and the occasional lime at someone’s house, but it is not the same. The shop was a special time and place and we’ve all had to acknowledge that we were lucky to have had it.

Living a creative life is not easy. Like any other profession, there are the days when you don’t want to get up and go to work. When you work as an artist, writer etc, you can’t exactly call in sick and not go to work, most times, the work does not wait for you and you aren’t paid if you’re not working. Most people think if you’re doing creative things that you float around, being all arty farty and it’s all wonderful, it is not. There is nothing worse than sitting staring at a blank page, blinking cursor, deadline looming and knowing, that you don’t have an idea in your head but you need to come up with one, fast. There are the days when the words flow, faster than your fingers can hit the keys but they’re all crap…of course, there are the times it’s almost as bad as giving birth, each word painfully yanked by its roots, painfully strung together to form coherent sentences. Forget paragraphs, you’d settle for sentences but nothing doing. Needless to say, now that this is not my life, I miss it like hell, the urge to create is still there simmering under the surface.

Lately, it’s been a challenge to write. Not that there is nothing to say, there is always something to say but there must be a balance so that the blog does not turn into a space that exists only to complain. Because in the end, this is not the reason for being, it is about living at least part of my life in a creative way. That was what drove my pardner Slacker and I to challenge each other to write, the almost urgent need to one up each other morphing into some really good stuff. Sadly, something we haven’t done that much of late. Life intrudes. Coffeedude asked weeks ago about the return of the Dragon Lady, well now you know. It is a titanium MacBook Pro with a blank page and blinking cursor.