Inspiration is a Cat

If you want to understand how inspiration works, you need to get yourself a cat. Not a dog. A cat.

Inspiration isn’t a dog. It isn’t something that’s going to come to you when you call it. It will not greet you when you come home.

It will come to you when it’s damn good and ready.

Inspiration, like a cat, is not something that you own. It is something that owns you, and you must feed it and and tend it and expect nothing from it whatsoever.

It will often demand your attention when you are in the middle of something else. It will also demand your attention—loudly—at the most inopportune and inconvenient hours. It will get indignant if you don’t heed this call for attention, and it will not leave you alone.

Occasionally it will bring things to you that are revolting. You will wonder where, in the name of all that is good and decent in the world, it found this awful thing that is now at your front door. You will realize that the best thing that you can do is just say thank you, and then go back to feeding it and caring for it in the hopes that it will bring you something nicer.

There will be times that it just won’t come to you. You will have no idea why it has chosen to take this leave of absence. Nonetheless, you must keep on attending to its health.

So that means, for me, writing all of these words, which is the equivalent of all those times I’ve opened cans of cat food, and all those times, just before I’ve left the house, that my cat has suddenly decided that now, not a few minutes ago, is the time that I must give it my full and undivided attention. Yes, I know that I could just leave the house, but, I mean, you should hear this plaintive meow; it tears your heart out.

I do all this because every once in a while, there will actually be moments where everything works out. It’s a glorious thing.

Sometimes it evolves from an inventory of the items that are on my desk at this particular moment (a desk lamp, my keys, my sunglasses, my checkbook, my Moleskine pad, my wallet, a Sharpie pen, four dollars, a Blue Snowball microphone and a diagram of a Choose Your Own Adventure book).

Sometimes it evolves from a cluster of words that emerge from a session of freewriting (I'm still trying to figure out where to use the words "Gypsy Mischief" that somehow spilled on the page between a bunch of other disjointed words). 

Or it may come from considering something from a different point of view.

I've spoken into a microphone many, many times. Have I ever considered this from the microphone's point of view?

What would it be like if a microphone could talk, after all the time it spent listening to all the things that people had said to it?

 If you had a conversation with a microphone it would be a patient listener, the sort of listener that would pause for a long moment and say “well, what do you think about that?”

If a microphone were your friend, you'd be able to talk to it at any hour of the day when you were feeling down, and it would listen to you. Occasionally, it might say something like “yeah, that’s really rough,” but for the most part it would just sit there patiently, letting you talk as long as you needed to, never growing tired of you.

If your friend the microphone were on the other end of a telephone conversation, it wouldn’t pretend to listen to you while checking its email. It would really listen to you, and if you ever needed to recall something that you said to it your friend the microphone, it would be able to remember it exactly.

Of course this could be a problem if you had a falling out with your friend the microphone. Your friend the microphone would be able to share everything with everybody. Your microphone would be able to write a tell all book complete with direct quotes of the most private things you said to it.

Headphones, meanwhile, wouldn't listen very much, but they'd be great conversationalists. They'd be lively and exciting, if a bit self-centered.

Headphones would be the one friend of yours that your other friend, the microphone, couldn’t listen to. Your friend the microphone would say to you “I…I can't listen to this person. I just can’t. I'll just start screeching if I have to listen to that person.”

That’s just the way it works.

So get a cat. Feed it. Care for it. And be ready for it when it decides to give you some attention.