The Dam In My Mind
Apr. 28th, 2005 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsGrand Coulee Dam, in Eastern Washington, is the largest concrete structure in the United States. I've been there three times and never ceased to be amazed at how massive it is. The approach is from the south, and across the dam, nestled between the north rockwall and the dam itself is what looks like a small concrete building, Powerhouse #3. It only look small because it is so far away: I've been inside Powerhouse #3, on a catwalk a hundred feet above the power plant floor, looking down on the six 700 megawatt generators that provide most of the electricity that powers my state. It is an impressive place that smells like the 1950s, when everyone wore starch white shirts and black slacks and perfect crewcuts and worked on massive industrial projects like this one.
For weeks now, my brain has felt like Powerhouse #3 with only one turbine running. The ideas are piling up behind the dam facade and I don't know what's going to happen when it breaks. Omaha believes it's the stress of our legal battles and that I'm asking too much of myself to be creative and clever while living through this ordeal, but it's so frustrating to feel all the characters and lives and ideas and programs that I want to indulge in on a regular basis just lying there, pushing against the wall, trying to get to the powerhouse, slowly deliquescing for lack of attention.
And part of it isn't just the lack of time. There's something else. I haven't figured it out yet. It's a, a... for lack of a better term, let's call it a lack of shamelessness. I can't quite seem to wake up the bravura necessary to say, "I'm going to write something, and then ask that someone pay me for it." A lot more than I'm doing now.
For weeks now, my brain has felt like Powerhouse #3 with only one turbine running. The ideas are piling up behind the dam facade and I don't know what's going to happen when it breaks. Omaha believes it's the stress of our legal battles and that I'm asking too much of myself to be creative and clever while living through this ordeal, but it's so frustrating to feel all the characters and lives and ideas and programs that I want to indulge in on a regular basis just lying there, pushing against the wall, trying to get to the powerhouse, slowly deliquescing for lack of attention.
And part of it isn't just the lack of time. There's something else. I haven't figured it out yet. It's a, a... for lack of a better term, let's call it a lack of shamelessness. I can't quite seem to wake up the bravura necessary to say, "I'm going to write something, and then ask that someone pay me for it." A lot more than I'm doing now.
