Oil on Canvas

von Marcus Krug

 

I am restless. I don’t know why. It’s the night from Monday to Tuesday and I haven’t put anything useful on paper in regards to the assignment for today. Write either six haikus or a pro or anti Valentine’s day story. Sounds pretty straight forward, I’d say.

But what I’ve come up with so far is utterly pathetic and unentertainingly boring. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it again. Is this writer’s block? It definitely feels like something I haven’t felt in a very long time. And even back then, when I did, I didn’t know what it was. A word like constipation then came to mind. Creatively constipated, I thought, I was.

Even if I left the whole assignment thing aside and try to write about anything that comes to mind, I don’t succeed. It’s almost like my creative channels have been glued shut.

It usually works like this: I just pick some random first lines to start with. Something that is catchy and draws the reader in. I like to think of myself as being particularly good at this.

Once I have the first sentences, which I rarely change as the story develops, the ideas spread like a wildfire. Everywhere in my brain the synapses go crazy.

Just imagine a calm surface of a random body of water. And then use an ordinary pipette and set one single drop of oil carefully somewhere on top. You can see how quickly the oily rainbow colours spread all over the water. That’s also the speed my ideas for the stories tend to grow.

Sometimes, if my thoughts run wild, it’s like you haven’t set the drop of oil gently onto the surface but let it fall down from a distance, the oily rainbow spreads in ripples, stirring the creativity up even more.

But at the moment, nothing like this is happening. Far from that. It is more like having a huge bathtub full of oil and a single drop of water tries very hard to merge with the oil. It’s simply not going to happen. Physics, pure and simple. Or chemistry for that matter. The drop of water will be sliding across the surface of the oil without any effect at all. Nothing, niente, nada, nix.

 

While I was trying to put my current dilemma into words here, some thoughts got caught in my frontal lobes’ selective attention department. One of the thoughts was about how unfortunate an institution this Valentine’s day actually is.

Come the first of February, a big cloud is approaching. It gets heavier and darker with every day it comes closer to the fourteenth. Romantic relationship’s judgement day. The performance of this particular day is a measure of how successful your relationship skills are. At least it feels like this.

Did you manage to get a reservation for the best restaurant in town, or are you taking her out for pizza at Napoli’s? What’s her favourite food, anyway? Maybe take her on a short city trip over the long weekend? But where to on this short a notice? Admit it, you weren’t paying much attention when she had her hint dropping day in late January, am I right?! How about roses then? How many did you get for her last year? Does she even like them? Or was it lilies? A fucking booby trap of a day!

And it is even worse for singles. So, what do you do? Probably call up your last mistake and see if she is available and desperate enough to do this. Then you have another awkward date. It doesn’t matter where you take her, but make sure the booze is cheap. So, you get drunk and have bad sex. Then you sneak out of her apartment as soon as she’s fallen asleep, delete her number and go home. At least you haven’t spent Valentine’s alone watching a film on your laptop; that would have been depressing, wouldn’t it?!

And if you nevertheless feel a little bit weary on the morning of the fifteenth, you still have the option of calling in sick or hope that Pancake day on the twenty-eighth will be more successful.