Can't think of anything new?

[Doreen Peri]

I couldn't figure out where to post this anti-academy, mystical, stream of poetic eye consciousness so my animal instinct said i should jam it right here 'cause maybe there are no more great ideas and since visually, showtime is showtime, I figured I'd have a sense of humor and Go! for it, despite the possibility of a rejection slip, so go ahead, after you read it, have a general discussion about it in the trailer park or throw it into the dumpster or the frigging fireplace, play it some music, film it or let it ferment until it creates its own culture base, give me feedback or not, but whatever you do, if you hate it, don't make an announcement out of it, ok? LOL!! i crack myself up... ok, so without further ado, here's the darn piece about thinking or not thinking of anything new.... Don't blame me! i'm reasonably sure it was YOU who thought of this first.... it just so happened that it burst outa me tonight. (That was just the intro. Dare to carry on. )
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Can't think of anything new?

In the ad industry, we always say, "Damn! Can't think of anything new!" because it's true. You come up with a great slogan or a cool gotchya theme for a display ad and then after you design it and produce it, you see a similar something somewhere, an ad in a magazine or a slogan on a billboard that sounds just the same and you say, NO! I just thought of that! That was MY theme! My idea! Ahhhh... but it wasn't after all. As the cliche says because cliches are what cliches are because they have truths in there somewhere, "Spaghetti? AGAIN?"

But the thing is, is, everybody makes a different sauce. Some use parsley, some oregano (ICK), some stick in some celery, some add sausage, some decide less is more, which it usually is, and go marinara with a sprinkle of fresh diced garlic.

Simplicity is the key. In thinking and in poetry. Whether your poem is a psychological theory or a treatise. Whether your thought analysis arrives at the same conclusion as the next or not. It's all unique. Everything you think is unique.

You can take the same palette as me, the exact tone and shade of every hue truly mirrored. We could clone the tones and shades and hues into one hundred more palettes, identical, pass them out to one hundred artists and distribute one hundred identical canvases and sit the one hundred artists under one tree, one at a time, at the exact same spot on the hill at the exact same time of day and say, "Paint that tree."

Same thought. Same idea. Same view. Same time of day. Same palette. Same hues, Same brush (oh, did I forget to mention the brush)? Same inspiration. And guess what we'd get? One hundred paintings of the very same tree. Right? What would be the difference? A tree is a tree, after all.

Give three conductors a symphony score and one orchestra of ninety seats, schedule three consecutive shows with the same audience as the constant in the set of variables, and what happens? Same score. Same composer. Same orchestra. Same audience. Very same idea. Let them do this same thing tomorrow and what do you get?

Don't tell me you can't think of anything new!

Every moment I breathe a breath of air, it's new! Each sequenced minute, each connected verb to noun, every sound of an echo is new! Do you hear the differences between my thoughts and yours? Of course you do! We can liken them. We can connect them like dots or not. Either way, we would not trade our own for another's!

Give me your idea and I'll make an ad out of it. We'll sell it to Madison Avenue so they can clone it. "I want my Maypo! I want my MTV!" Or I'll give you mine and you can intuitively take it wherever you want. Even if you think of it as I do, what you think will be uniquely yours.

God, I hate to come to conclusions like that! It should be up to readers to draw their own conclusions, which you will, anyway, even though I drew mine and even though yours might be the same. They will still be different. Here is where the sameness and the difference sets in. Here is where the samenesses and differences set in. Are those two sentences the same?

Can't think of anything new?
I beg you to try how not to.
You can't help it. You've got to.

[WIREMAN]

............let's be mindless.....-D.......mindless let us be.....o say can ya see....ain't no why....only powder blue skies....after rainy days....
lil drums with seed pod thinggies.....and insane poets on guit-fiddles.....be mindless set ya free....big Domino Sugar sign....up on old Federal Hill....walkin' the dog.....o yeah walkin' the dog.....watchin' the bright golden sun go down.....zaar runnin'.... glowin' on the rise.......what's inside a thee....taint no surprise...I'll tell ya know lies...and if ya watch an old episode of I SPY....mindless I must be......wired

[Doreen Peri]

Hi Mark

I've never understood that "mindless" concept. I treasure my mind. Why would I want to be without it? Maybe this philosophy about mindlessness will be explained to me one day. But if I didn't have a mind, how would I be able to comprehend the philosophy at all?

Let's analyze this, shall we? I think it's a good thing to mind ones own business. Not that I mind it when someone minds mine, because, Lord knows, I could use the concern of those who wouldn't mind minding me for a while. But it's also a matter of mind over matter. A lot of the things I'm mindful about often don't matter. As a matter of fact, I was minding my own business just today and I found out that the business I was minding was much less important than I had originally considered, once I started being concerned with being mindful of it. Less of this type of mindfulness would be a good idea, since it's not worth being mindful of matters which don't matter, never mind those which do.

After being so mindful of minding my own business which didn't matter, I reminded myself not to become so self absorbed, which was something that I hadn't thought of before, no matter how much I had reminded myself to think about it previously. So, I came to the conclusion that I have to remind myself repeatedly about such things. Otherwise, I'll forget to be mindful of them which would be a mindless thing to do and I can't afford to be mindless like that! Imagine the other matters I would forget to be mindful of if I was mindless about them? I imagine eventually, I'd be reminded by someone else than me who was mindful enough to observe my negligence and tell me I wasn't minding my matters well enough.

But then again, as I think of all this, my mind gets sort of bogged down by the continued reminders of how heavy these matters are on my mind, so I wouldn't mind not thinking about it for a while, but if I do that, I become mindful of how much I forgot to remind myself of.

So, my only conclusion is to continue as I am, never mind the obviousness of the fact that I don't mind it when others have to remind me that they themselves have decided to mind my business for me, which, of course, when mindful of this, it's boggling to the mind!



I hope you didn't mind my rambling on here about all these things which have been on my mind. I know others have thought of these types of things, as well, in their own minds, and so I think it's a good reassurance to remind them in writing, straight from my mind, that I agree with them and that even though they think they have thought of something new, no, in fact, they haven't, although in all of our minds, we each consider these matters differently, which is what my piece above is about to begin with.

Thanks for reading it! And Im glad you're having a good day! I wouldn't mind having a dog to walk myself, but I'm not too hip on how dogs sweat through their tongues and somehow, after a while, I'd probably mind it if I had a dog which sweated from his tongue onto my sneakers while I was walking him. I'm sure HE wouldn't mind much, but then again, dogs don't have minds that really reason these things out like we do. I'm sure it wouldn't even matter to him. But since I'm very aware, because of my active mind, that mind over matter is a cliche because it's so true that we must be mindful of such things, it wouldn't matter much if the dog didn't mind if he messed my sneakers at all.

I hope all of this is clear. My mind's been a little foggy lately trying to figure out all the things I should be mindful of, but mind you, I'm working toward it through contemplation, something I wouldn't be able to do without my mind.