Ennui is the Tenth Muse.

There are days when creativity flows from your fingers like a flooded riverbed.  Each finger is a tributary that leads to a snaking body of water that manifests itself in a keyboard (musical or typing), a brush, a chisel, a cello, ballet shoes, or even scanning the skies with a telescope in search for a new star.

Then there are the days when that riverbed dries up.  You sit before the implement of your creativity with a blank stare.  Minutes, hours, days go by.  You know you should go for a walk, do some weight training, or at least meditate to clear your mind.  You return to your office or studio, and the riverbed is still barren.

Your magnum opus refuses to come to fruition.

Melancholia I, by Albrecht Dürer (Public Domain)

 I find myself indulging in the least constructive vices to distract my mind from my writing and my art.  My most corrosive vice is YouTube.

I will spend hours scrolling from one recommended video to another.  I will sometimes play the same clip three times in one day if I find it especially amusing.  From after breakfast until before dinner, I hop from one video to the next.

I told my therapist about this addiction.  I often compared it to Denzel Washington's character in Robert Zemeckis' film Flight.  In one scene, Denzel opens a liquor cabinet with all these small bottles of alcoholic beverages.  He takes out one and focuses on it with a pensive gaze.  The audience wonders if he is gong to pop it open and drink it.  He smiles, shakes his head, and places it on the top oof the cabinet.  He walks away.  The camera frames the bottle in a close up.  I, among the audience, believe he has triumphed over his addiction...

...until his hand, like a bird of prey, swoops down and snatches the bottle.

I described this scene to my therapist as an analogue to my social media addiction.   I tell her that I avoided addictive drugs for all my life - from youth to adulthood - until this unforeseen vice occupied my mind.

My therapist told me, "You're not alone in this.  Many people I work with have this addiction."

So, one day, I sit before my laptop.  I don't feel the urge to scroll through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.  My mind itches for a creative outlet, but my screenplay sits there on the screen incomplete.

Urania, Calliope, Terpsichore, Melpomenia, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Clio, and Thalia are the traditional Nine Muses.  Allow me to introduce a tenth.

Ennui.

Out of nowhere, an impulse spurs me into action.  I open the Photo Booth app on my laptop and take a photo of myself.  I take a post of a man caught in a snapshot.  I wear a look of shock on my face and make a warding of gesture with my hand in the foreground.   I transfer it to Photos and play with the various filters:  Black and White, Greyscale... SEPIA.  I see myself as some celebrity caught with his guard down for a pulp celebrity hound magazine from the fifties.

I examine it for several minutes.  Something is missing.  I don't think the composition is complete.  I feel there should be something scandalous, even criminal, in the photo.  A big time vice peddler being brought to justice perhaps?

I remember a bandit mask - like Robin from Batman - that I used for Halloween was languishing in one of the shelves of my desk.  I reach into the drawer and whip it out.  I don it.  With a burst of prestidigitation, I have taken another photo of myself:  A bandit mask over my eyes that cannot conceal my staged shock,   my jaw is dropped in surprise and my outstretched, splayed fingers cover the left hand side of the frame.

Back to the photos app.  I tint the photo with a sepia filter.  There is the criminal.  An Al Capone finally brought to justice by some out of frame Elliot Ness.  I fill out the backstory of this character.  He's a bootlegger from the Roaring Twenties who runs a speakeasy promoting every conceivable vice.  Swinging Jazz.  Gambling.  Drinking.  Smoking the devil's lettuce.  Loose women and all girl choruses.  Vices too repugnant to mention (orgies?  Maybe prostitiution?).

I grant a name to this fictional scofflaw:  Slip-a-Mickey Baker.

From the archived pages of the now defunct newspaper, The New York Beacon:

SCANDAL!   November 23, 1929.   John Joyce "Slip-a-Mickey" Baker, the proprietor of the speakeasy known as the Lucky Jacks Club, was busted by government agents in a raid on his disreputable establishment.

The Lucky Jacks Club is notorious for selling whiskey, bourbon, champagne, and all shades of Satan's sauce.  Other vices include high stakes gambling, social dancing, and girl's cabaret, among other tawdry activities this publication is loath to print on its pristine, law abiding pages.  There will be no Happy Thanksgiving for THIS salacious scofflaw!

I post it on my Facebook and Instagram pages.  It is the source of amusement for many of my friends and acquaintances.   I myself felt like a proud papa for this execrable criminal brainchild.

It's a favorite pastime of mine.  I often depict myself as the subject of some form of punishment or persecution.  Out of all my illustrations of self-mortification, this is my masterpiece.  A caprice of ennui and a silly sense of humor.  It was cobbled together, ex nihilo, in the space of a few minutes.

Sometimes, self-expression finds a way.

- JJB

First and third images by John Joyce Baker