This month’s lecture is very nearly written, and maybe it only feels like I’m behind schedule because the last Wednesday in October was three days closer to the end of the month than the last Wednesday of November is. Or maybe it’s because I, like everyone, lost some time and used up a lot of energy thinking about the election and the fate of our republic. But either way, it’s the time in the cycle when I shift from verbal to visual thinking. Some months I have what might be interesting ideas about what kind of images I want to use, but this isn’t one of those ones.

Where my mind wants to go is the future, and in this I’m probably not alone either. Early reports of a vaccine that appears to be successful shift my mind forward eight or nine months to when I’ll be able to shake hands with a friend again; some work I’ve just about completed has me looking ahead to all the free time I imagine I’ll have when that’s off my plate next week; the semester schedule sets my sights on mid-December; and of course there’s holiday, holiday, new year, spring. Summer. All right Conley, reel it in.

This month’s Wave Machine provided some opportunities that last month’s didn’t. Which is why I’m working with chance and why I get frustrated with chance. As they say, though, that frustration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. So’s the pressure—pressure put on the thought by the sentence, on my visual imagination by my meager ability, on my time by where the Wednesdays fall. 

It’s occurred to me that cigarette smoking doesn’t relieve anxiety by relieving anxiety, but by creating a new anxiety that you know how to address—by smoking another cigarette. So here I am, lighting up another Wednesday blog post, shifting creative gears, shushing the ideas for next month’s lecture, next year’s lectures, all the new and wonderful Machines I’ll build, and the glory! Don’t forget the glory. Always in the future. And me never there with it.