Shifting creative gears.

It’s definitely a strange day, so it’s time for a strange post.

I slept in today, which makes it strange to begin with. I didn’t even get out of bed until 7:30AM. Ask my wife, that’s pretty late. I stayed up last night trying to fix the contact form for a new friend, but needed sleep before I figured it out. Anyway, I had a good morning. Showered, actually felt inclined to shave, got all metrosexual and moisturized, clipped my nails, all that jazz. Didn’t think about web-standards once.

Then I’m driving to the office. The windows on my ‘89 Corolla are open and it feels like Fall and smells like Summer. There’s dog hair floating around me like snow. Everything feels kind of dreamy and I’m seeing beauty in everything. I even found something strangely poetic about a fake boat propeller on the hitch of a pickup truck as it spun in the wind. I saw a girl that looked more strung out than any Minneapolis hooker in the middle of winter and I paused to imagine her story. There was a strange poetry about the small town I live in, with it’s badly painted, decrepit buildings and motley bunch of small town personalities milling about the broken streets on a Saturday morning.

So I drive right past the office because all I want to do is stay in this moment. I don’t feel like turning this poetry into creative energy for a client. I feel like enjoying a visceral experience that I haven’t felt since my wild days of substance abuse and sleeplessness. There’s no emotional pain involved this time. It’s a happy, albeit melancholy feeling, but there’s poetry floating in the air.

Then the feeling passed and the song on the iPod changed to something that just couldn’t support the mood. So here I am at the office, reminiscing about a feeling I had 20 minutes ago. And thoughts of CSS and color theory are once again taking hold of my brain. But I think it changed me, even if just for today. I regained a creative part of my brain that I think had gotten lost beneath piles of code. I think I’ll work harder to blend beauty and standards, creating something that I can be proud of, maybe even satisfied with.

The latest issue of HOW had some great tips for sparking creativity in the office environment. I run the office, why aren’t we building a more creative environment? Things are going to change around here.