Flashes in the Shower
For some reason my most creative ideas come to me in
the shower. I wish I had some receptacle,
other than my very overloaded mind, in which to collect them, because they come
flowing in and then are all washed out with the last of the suds. Perhaps one day someone will obligingly
invent a recording device embedded in a shower head …except that when it
malfunctions all those carefully hoarded ideas might be washed out with the
next jet of water.
So how does one hold on to those flashes of inspiration? I’ve often wondered. Notebooks are the answer, said one wise friend. I tried that. Didn’t work. Ideas don’t actually wait – even for a hurried exit from under the shower. Nor do they always survive the transition from thought to paper. In my case they almost always emerge as a somewhat indecipherable linking of letters which are generally consigned to the trash can. Puts me in mind of Liv Tyler in ‘Stealing Beauty’ - where the character she played wrote poetry while in the bathtub, only to shred it soon after. I wonder if she felt like I do – that all those thoughts, words and ideas which we imagined were so creative when they echoed above the sound of rushing water, lost their charm when set down in cold ink.
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