All In The Blink of An Eye

I gave one of my friends the link to this blog recently. I told her to look around and read anything that looked interesting. The next night, she sends me an instant message saying that I need to write a new blog entry. My response to her was:

"I just had this image in my head of you in a dark room, blinds shut, despite it being well after sundown, a cigarette in your hand, three more in the ash tray, smoked down to the filter, a knocked over tumbler with the remnants of cheap scotch dripping out, and you glued to your computer screen, shaking from all those chemicals coursing through your body as you just finished reading my 394th blog entry."

When said that I just had that image, I meant it quite literally. It flashed before me, the whole thing in the blink of an eye. I then had to madly dash the entire thing down before I lost all of these fine details. I also wanted to portray this image with the right style, dark and gloomy, with an energy akin to a candle in its final seconds before finally petering out. Of course, that part was secondary.

These flashes are like dreams. They are so vivid, but they have a minuscule half-life, dissipating into nothingness within seconds. Sometimes brilliant ideas can strike like lightning and disappear just the same. If you want to keep them (and you should), then either try your hardest to keep as much in your head as possible (say it out loud, think about it, try to relive it over and over again) or write it down somewhere as fast as possible. It sucks if you get such a flash in the middle of driving somewhere, but if you have the chance to record an idea, make sure you get to it right away. Every second that passes causes something to be lost.