This pretty much says it all...

I really AM stressing out. I've had my sketchbook for over a month now. It sits there in my studio..mocking me. Blank and cold and cream colored. I tortured it a bit the other day - tore a page out of it - and certain I heard it wince. That's what it gets for being blank, uninspiring and uppity. There are excited artists who are filling up the pages while mine sit empty and impatient. Oh yes, some of them have even taken their journals apart to reconfigure into something unusual and are now restitching them back together. And frankly..I want to SCREAM! I'm seeing how far behind I am and how uninspired..it's awful!

I went out on a limb and joined in the project and both life and my ideas have gotten the best of me. I can't watch this train leave the station without me! I have to finish this..I have to leave my mark behind. This sketchbook is my scream to the world, "Hey! I'm out here you know!" and if I miss out - well it will have been self-sabotage and that damn sketchbook knows it. I want to be a title in the Brooklyn Art Library..I want to be a book that becomes old and tattered that someday someone flips through only to become curious as to who I was and what I did and where I lived. It's a small piece of immortality (even if only for a time) at a time in my life when I'm not even sure that I'll be missed once I exit the planet.

And then I recalled a poem by Edgar Allen Poe (one of my favorites really) of a raven that mocked him much like my sketchbook. And I thought for a moment that I could glean some insight until I recalled the whole story and remembered that the narrator in the poem actually dies from fright. *sigh* My muse better show up QUICK because there's no way in hell I'm going to die from the fright of a sketchbook.