Having an imagination is like having an attic in your brain full of stuff you don’t remember ever buying. If you are a creative person, and I fancy myself one, having an imagination is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it means I can write and I can imagine people and places and entire worlds that exist nowhere else but in my head until I can get them into a format that others can read and then it gets to become part of their imagination as well. However, it is a curse because then no matter what, you can always imagine the worst. When I break up with a girlfriend I am not the type who remains friends with them because I can imagine them in graphic detail doing things with other men they happen to be dating. That noise in the night instantly becomes a vampire, Bigfoot or Charles Manson.

However, if you have an attic you know that an attic is usually the place where you store a lot of junk. Usually you shove the junk into cardboard boxes and then stuff them into a dusty corner where spiders immediately get excited about the new condo that just went up down the street and they all move in. You promptly forget about it until you decide to sell your home and then you just take those dusty unopened boxes and move them to the attic of your new place. If you happen to be completely insane you might actually take out the dusty box, open it and then transport the stuff in that old box into a new box and then you shove that into the attic in your new place.

An imagination can be like that as well. Sometimes it just gets so full of crap that it’s hard to find anything new in there. You root around in the cleaner corners and hope you can find something new but sometimes that place is empty and you end up looking in those dark and dusty places. You start opening the boxes and pulling things out.

Writing can be like that. Sometimes the world just seems to big and too full of things you can’t explain. There’s an election just a week away but the hate-filled ads on both sides of the aisle that all of it has become a meaningless din that has nothing to do with the actual issues. If it were possible to walk into a voting booth (if you happen to live in a place that still uses booths) and it were possible to vote for “None of the Above” in every race I would say go for it. You can’t do that though, so I don’t know what to tell you.

Over on the other side of the world there is one crazy nutbag with his hands on nuclear weapons. His people often eat birds from the trees along with squirrels and whatever else they can find because there is no food but he has his hands on weapons that can wipe out millions in the blink of an eye. While I didn’t live through all of the Cold War I lived under enough of it to not want to think about going back to those uncertain times when television mini-series like “The Day After” seemed all too possible.
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away from that guy is another guy who is probably laying awake at nights having the kind of dreams most teenage boys have about cheerleaders when they’re in high school bout getting his own hands on a nuclear weapon. He says he only wants to get his hands on some nuclear materials to create electrical energy but you know he has sweaty, heart-pounding dreams of watching Israel disappearing under a mushroom cloud. See, this nutbag thinks everyone who is Jewish should be wiped out. The scary thing about this guy is when he sits down and talks to Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” he doesn’t seem like a nutbag. He seems smart. He seems sane. Those are the scariest nutbags.

These things lurk in the dark corners of the attic in the boxes and covered with spider-webs that may or may not still contain a few spiders. You want to write about them. If you write about them maybe they will seem a little less scary but then again they seem too big and scary to write about.

Over here, in this corner, you have a box you recently put up here and in here is the guy who walked into an Amish school house and killed a bunch of young girls. You wrote about this once already but the inside of his box is so scary you can’t help but taking another peek.

Sometimes it’s all just too much and none of it really makes and sense and you just have to shrug and maybe try to ignore the boxes. Meanwhile the month ends and it is the deadliest month in a country where we have no business being and so many more young men and women you will now not have the chance to ever meet are gone. You wonder if one of them might have been the guy who would have bought one of your books to publish it for his company some day. You wonder if maybe that young woman with the blood forming beneath her might one day have worked for a newspaper that just happened to be looking for a columnist and your brand of writing was just what they were looking for.

Right over here there is a scientist who has, in his head, the possibility to cure a number of horrible diseases. He thinks it might be the cure. It will be a long road. Even if he can get the funding and the legal right to move forward with his research it may still take fifteen or twenty years before there is anything that his research may prove. For all he knows this may end up being a dead end. Maybe this research isn’t the magic he’s hoping for. The problem is he can’t do anything to even start that long road because laws are blocking him and he can’t even get the materials he needs to take the first step.

You don’t have answers for him. Nobody listens anyway. The politicians don’t really care because none of them have any diseases that they want cured and they are so busy clinging to the hot-button issues they can’t really see what they’re arguing for or against anyway. So, you stating one thing or another really doesn’t seem to make a difference.

The world seems too big at times. What’s funny is that the world, with the technology at our fingertips, is actually smaller than ever before. No one can really disconnect anymore. Despite this so much of the world seems further away than ever before. Of course you also hope that asteroid you read about is also further away than ever before but you can’t really be sure.

It’s tough having an imagination. Sometimes the brain just wants to take a break and not try to solve the world’s problems. Shutting off the imagination is tough, though. It doesn’t always let you sleep. It also doesn’t fill up blog entries by being quiet.

I’m going to put my old boxes back in my attic for tonight. Maybe the mail will bring something new and exciting tomorrow.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s new novel Dust is now available for sale at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.