There are at least 3 people in this neighborhood who collect old cars. One person has about 3-5 domestic cars from the 70s, another has a few French cars from what looks like the 60s, and another has around 4 French or European cars from the 70s or 80s. All but maybe one of these appears to have been fixed up or restored.
Suburbia is a weird place. There’s enough space that people think they can collect large objects, but not so much space they can literally throw things on a heap in the backyard. I’m not the sort of person who knows makes and models of cars very well, though I can appreciate older cars when they’ve been fixed up, but buying up collector cars and pretending to be interested in restoring them is one of those stupid things that people in suburbia do all the time. I suspect many people around here are retired, since this area is a little older anyway, but every street seems to have at least one dirty classic car rotting out front.
I often wonder, “What in the world was going through these people’s heads?” It seems to be fairly common for older guys to have a classic car project they hope to get around to someday. I get it. Sometimes working on the car can be fun, and it’s usually more fun if you don’t need the car to run tomorrow. These older cars are projects people can tinker with from time to time, and make progress at their own pace. But I’ve never seen anything done on these particular collections. One other guy has a 1920s Ford out front that’s in decent condition, but he doesn’t drive it, there’s a woodblock there to prevent the car from rolling forward, and it’s literally blocking one half of his garage. $50 says that garage is full of crap.
It’s easy for me to criticize the weirdness of this, but don’t I have projects that have been sitting on my to-do list for years?
That Lego VX-10000 isn’t going to build itself, though I did finally pick it up last month and make some progress. I probably have half a dozen stories floating around in my head, too, several of which have been there for well over a decade and growing ever since. But I have yet to bother actually trying to write them. I had a few video games I’ve meant to play back through, I still want to scan my old mining catalogs, and there are of course several books I’d like to read or re-read.
Although something of a minimalist in possessions, I’m realizing I’d also like to be a minimalist in projects. If I have too many projects, the pressure weighs me down and I procrastinate, effectively working on none of them. I recently mentioned getting rid of one of my old Lego projects, which was a huge relief, but this goes deeper.
I’m really beginning to question those stories I’ve wanted to write. I hate to throw out something creative that really means something to me, but will I ever actually write all of those stories? Will any one of them be even remotely successful? I wanted to be a writer late in high school, and whenever I shared a story, it was often favorably received by my friends. But I have to ask those brutally honest questions: can these even be completed? Am I even capable of writing a compelling chapter? I very rarely read fiction, so it’s not like I’m getting any ideas from other authors, either. And fiction writing is something I never do in my free time (I feel much more comfortable writing on this blog). I hate to say it, but…is there even a point to holding onto these stories? All of them have glaring gaps in the plot, and some have flat characters I’ve never been able to fix. Or would it be possible to pick one story, pour my energies into that and actually write it, and discard the others? I can almost guarantee you I will never write all of these.
I watched a short YouTube video about screen writing that asked several questions of a professional in the industry. At one point the speaker addressed the issue that sometimes actors have this singular, terrible idea that they simply refuse to let go of and keep insisting be worked into the movie. He explained that the writing team, in contrast, doesn’t get too personally attached to their ideas because they have a creative mindset, and they come up with 100 ideas in a day, with 99 being discarded. The poor actor, trying to assume the role of a writer, only has that one idea and so refuses to let go of it. This reminded me of my own stories. Could it be that these are all terrible, but I simply refuse to let go of them? I have very mixed feelings about this. I say they “mean a lot to me”, but what does that actually matter if they happen to suck?
And my priorities are shifting. In the next few months, I will probably be booking my flight for a great adventure next year. I will need to begin some sort of fitness regimen to prepare for this trip, too. This could be a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I will absolutely need to get my priorities straight: preparing for this trip will need to be my most important project for the foreseeable future.
And while I’ve made progress getting rid of junk projects, the work is not done. I can feel it.
Now, there’s no sense in throwing all of your projects out: some of them are very good for you, sometimes even the challenging ones. But it’s hard because we take our projects seriously. Sometimes we want them to define us, or speak to our personality. Sometimes they are necessary chores. But sometimes they are relics of the past, imperfectly reflecting what we thought were our dreams and desires, but which we never bothered to scrutinize and question as we moved through life, changing and growing.
My mech stories? I dunno, man. I’d almost being willing say “forget about it!” I have absolutely no knowledge of the military, and I would need to do some serious scientific research to give those stories the remotest chance of sounding real. Kills me a little inside, though, since I really loved my term for the weapon storage and some of the themes, but it takes way more than that to carry a story forward.
So while I never spend any time writing fiction, I do spend a decent amount of time reading history, and some time learning more topics in programming. I also like taking walks around the neighborhood, and hiking of course. We only have so much time on this earth. You can do many things in this life, but you can’t do everything. When push comes to shove, is there anything else I would rather do than keep throwing lazy ideas at these stories?
For that matter, I have yet to build a Lego house based on 1920s designs, as I’d planned to do several years ago. Makes me wonder if I even care these days.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to emotionally let go of all of my projects, and watch which ones actually crawl back. I feel weary of all these plans I’ve had over the years, but if I could just focus on the few that really truly mean something to me, I feel I could accomplish something deeply meaningful with my life. There’s a lot to think about here.