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April 19, 2009
Freedom, my new best friend
Immediately on my mind is the troubling notion that the mercury hit 99 degrees in Los Angeles today. Marathon training just got a whole lot more difficult.
And now let me jump directly into a passage from Nabokov's The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight whose unique veracity hit me the other day straight between the eyes:
His struggle with words was unusually painful and this for two reasons. One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shuddering of the still unclothed thought clamoring for them on this side of the abyss.
It goes on from there, and gets better and better, and reading it I thought that this was precisely why my arrival at any sort of written conclusion is always such an long, arduous and, in far too many instances, as-yet-unfinished process. And then a second realization overlapped the first: I was flattering myself. I don't deserve the luxury of commiserating over such creative pangs because these days I scarcely let myself feel them, so consumed am I with that most modern of distractions: the internet. I can't even pretend I'm browsing for information anymore: my online behavior these days is unmistakably that of an addict. In the amount of time I spend per day clicking listlessly through the same cycle of websites, I could have multiplied my output - or, at the very least, have a trail of bloody fingerprints on the parchment to prove that I'm working towards an output, multiplied or otherwise. It gets in the way of everything else, too; had I merely avoided Facebook just in the past week alone, I could have not only have finished reading Sebastian Knight, but devoured Nabokov's entire ouvere.
So I was thrilled last week when James pointed me in the direction of a program entitled Freedom, the sole purpose of which, as far as I'm concerned, is to rescue me from myself. It blocks all internet accessibility and networking opportunity for a duration of your own choosing; the only way to get around it, once it's in effect, is to hit the reboot button. I started using it this weekend. It worked! Moreso, within the first few minutes, simply knowing that I couldn't do so much as check my e-mail had a tremendous calming affect on my apparently addled brain. I felt at peace. And, indeed, I got stuff done. I used it for two hours this morning and wrote more than I had all weekend. As soon as I finish this I'm going to turn it back on again.
One note: I've noticed that the software, when enabled, has a habit of freezing up my desktop when I try to open up certain applications that automatically search for internet connections, such as iTunes. It even locked up Final Draft once or twice. A mild nuisance, but not even close to enough to get me to stop using it.
Posted by David Lowery at April 19, 2009 10:51 PM