I wound up in a Tempe coffee shop called Cartel. I was holding a notebook in one hand and a Pale Ale in the other–an old order Mennonite in a sea of glowing Apple Macbooks. Everyone arond me seemed like derivatives of one stereotype or another. There were the classic 99-percenter’s the bowtie professors, the hip kids, and so on. Even the music shifted with whichever caricature was on a particular duty station. In the moments it took me to move from the back door to order my beer and to a table, we’d shifted from a playlist best described as Britney Spears vs. The Spice Girls to an early century R&B retrospective featuring songs like Tweet’s 2002 hit, Oops (oh my). Nothing about this shop was normal. Nothing was Starbucks or anything corporate here, which made it an ideal location to explore 10 minutes of writing.
I used to live in coffee shops and on street corners and bus stations and city parks where the kids played basketball behind mesh fences and the squeak of sneakers mingled with the harsh grunts of play and the good natured insults of boys. I collected these human moments and carefully filed them away for future use. They were my fossil fuels of creativity that existed more commonly in the madness of New York City than anywhere else I’ve lived. I’ve long held that Arizona hurt my writing. This has proven to be true only in the fact that the limited number of human interactions of the style that I thrive upon are rarely available to me here. I ceased to have access to my fossil fuels. Without those interactions I dove deeper into the virtual. I swapped human contact for the static pleasure of TV shows and virtual reality. I ceased living in the social world and carved out a meager existence online. I still marvel at the day I came to realize that I was playing a game online (Eve) in which I was working a boring menial job and somehow acting like that job was exciting and meant more to me than the boring menial job I was at that actually made me real money.
Then I realized something else. Finding moments of inspiration is no dependent on place so much as it is on attitude about place, time, and situation. While I was online doing the work of space miner, I would imagine all the wonderful things happening in the virtual world around me. My state of mind made the mundane magical. I made my own fuel. This is something anyone can replicate if we let ourselves. Even Britney Spears blaring from overhead speakers can be someones voice of creativity.