Collaboration

I’m normally a person who does his best work alone. When the partial phrase “group proj…” was uttered at any level of school, I almost always threw up a little. I never felt my best work was completed that way.

Lately, however, a couple of opportunities have presented themselves in which I could collaborate with responsive, open, honest, and respectful minds. It gives me a glimmer of hope that I may be able to work with someone in a creative fashion.

An old friend or two has agreed to work with me on their fall shows, and at times I find myself very happy to have such inventive, creative material and feedback with which to work. Tonight, I spent three hours in a co-write (smack dab in the middle of the Tech bball game) with a guy who loved what we started with enough that he agreed with me that we couldn’t phone the second verse in. That seems to be rare around here. For better or worse, we wrote nary a word in stone. We spent that time debating the character of the character we were writing. Though I know I am bad about injecting talk like that into everyday conversation at times, I’m really glad he had the patience and resolve to respect the seed of the song enough to make sure that the execution was deserving of its origin.

I curse my work on a frequent basis, but I suspect that is more out of loneliness or frustration than anything. I really like making stuff up. I function really well in a make-believe world. I have always been better at that than maintenance, and that realization honestly is owed to Dwight, whether or not he is an ass.

Unfortunate also, however, is that I make up a lot of things. Sometimes, I insist that they must become true, and torture my chassis until it becomes so. Other times, I wind up disappointed. And I guess that winds up as fuel for more imagination.

I would love to live in a world of truth… where things were obvious, and time wasn’t wasted figuring out what reality was. I would love to live in a world in which people weren’t offended when you said what you really thought, and where you never lived in fear of doing that.

I think that’s a pipe dream. But I do appreciate the glimpses of that possibility that I get when someone tells me that I did something exactly right, or exactly wrong. I appreciate my current collaborators in all media for doing that.

What I fear the most is that I might love that idea so much that I won’t be able to function long in a world that isn’t based on telling the truth the second you know it. I worry that I might believe in the face value so much that I may not ultimately be able to deal with the fact that we lie and mislead in order to end in a way that meets our satisfaction.

I have rarely been happy with the truth, but I have always been satisfied when it was given to me completely and without remorse or reservation. I’m not much of a salesman for that reason… I demand that you know of my penchant for sleeping long hours, a relaxed glass of jack, the stupid in the context of the noble, and a disdain for those who can’t make decisions and don’t think about the big picture before doing so. I guess my only outlet at this point is to keep doing what I (and maybe I only) know how to do. That is to be myself, and trust that there are more people out there willing to think the same thing.

For now, I seem to be calmed by the fact that I couple of great collaborators are listening, and they’re telling me everything they think and perceive. And that’s fine… for now.