Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Writing at the Speed of a Melting Popsicle

By Andi Kopek

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A popsicle.

A little girl is holding a popsicle in her hand. The color is red.

It’s so hot—so steaming hot—that the popsicle is dripping on her fingers, but she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even notice it. She licks it innocently. The popsicle drips through one finger, then the next, down her little pinky, onto her clothes, and finally, the ground. She doesn’t mind.

Why are popsicles called popsicles? Pop-sicle. From icicle? But why POP-sicle? Why not sun- sicle? Or sweet-sickle? Or slash-sickle?

When I was a little boy, I didn’t eat popsicles. Maybe ice cream on a stick—but I didn’t like them. They dripped too quickly. Dripping again. It was unpleasant. Nasty. I don’t like mess.

When I was a child I liked eating brine cucumbers instead—from a big barrel with herbs. From a local store with vegetables. Zielona Budka it was called. The Green Hut. I forgot the name of the herb. The name of the herb. The herb. But the smell was so distinct. Summers weren’t this hot or humid then. Definitely not this humid. They were bearable.

But I couldn’t step into the stream that flowed near our house. A sign nailed to a small pine tree said “Do Not Enter.” There was always this thin black line on the banks—pollution. So strange, isn’t it? That rivers are polluted? Dill. It was dill.

Same with the Baltic Sea. You’d walk along the shore and see a thin line of oil—leaking from tankers, maybe. How much oil needs to spill to leave a line like that? Shorelines stretch endlessly. So it must be a massive amount. And yet it’s just… normal. There was no way to talk about it. No one raised it as a question. No one wanted to listen.

It seemed hopeless to raise this issue. Hopelessness was everywhere. And it’s what made me move. Made me search for something else—some place where hope exists.

Because a hopeless man can’t make a difference. That’s unbearable. And passion? You couldn’t express passion. If you had feelings, you had to bury them. And you’d be dead. Had no feelings? How can you live without feelings? Also dead. Either way—passion or apathy—you were dead. So I looked for a place where you might feel alive. Really alive. And I moved.

And when I found it—disappointment. Because people are the same. Buildings are, pretty much, the same. At least similar. Some things differ, but at the core, no real changes. It was rather surprising. And disappointing.

No matter where you live, this side of the pond, or the other, this continent or that—people behave the same. Systems differ, sure. Maybe there’s more of one thing here, less of another there. But manipulation is the same. The desire to control others, the masses? The same.

Maybe there once were tribes, cultures, societies driven by different values. Not just different beliefs—different internal forces. Not focused on profit, progress, goals. But they’re gone.

Crushed. At least, they’re no longer the dominant force.

Put a peaceful person in a room with someone okay with killing… Guess who survives? The second one doesn’t blink and pulls the trigger. No hesitation. And no guilt afterward. No guilt afterward is terrifying. Can give me nightmares. That’s how people with high morality die.

That’s how reflective people disappear. That’s how good people don’t survive. Because the ones willing to negotiate, to coexist, to cooperate… by definition, they are always at a disadvantage. The ones who don’t care about destroying them? They win.

That’s how the world is skewed. And that balance? It will never be restored. Never existed. The imbalance repeats itself. One generation to the next. Until the skew becomes so extreme that people go mad and destroy each other. And justify it, of course. And then the remaining few start the cycle again.

That’s the story of human life on this planet. It’s so short. And so cyclic. We pride ourselves on our “progress.” We love talking about how our societies have “evolved.” But if you study history carefully, you’ll see, nothing is new.

We just forgot. We forget. We forget. We forget and repeat. Amnesia is built into the system. Everything from the past returns—distorted. A ghost, shifting form, always changing. We think we know it. But we don’t. We think we learn from history. But we don’t. And even if we do—it means nothing. We can’t or don’t want to act on it. Well, the ones who want, usually don’t have enough power. And if they make a change, it is rather short lived. Because of the nature of man.

So how do you enjoy life, knowing this? Knowing that we don’t learn? Knowing that goodness is always at a disadvantage? How do you live like that?

Maybe…

Maybe we just start with a popsicle. On a hot, humid, sunny August day.

At a brewery where kids run around and play…

Author’s Note

This piece was created using a stream-of-consciousness technique, beginning with a real observation of a child holding a melting popsicle at a local brewery during this summer’s extreme heat. Because my writing speed lags substantially behind the pace of my thoughts, I decided to record them instead—capturing this internal monologue as it unfolded. It was recorded on an iPhone 13Pro Max using the Voice Memos app, transcribed via Otter.ai, and lightly edited for readability.

As both a neuroscientist and writer, I’m fascinated by stream-of-consciousness as a way of capturing thought in its raw, unfiltered form—before logic and language shape it. Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Clarice Lispector explored this terrain, but the tone and emotional cadence of this piece are perhaps closest to the style of Thomas Bernhard. The process felt amazing, like creating in a fascinating, improvisational way, as if the thoughts were composing themselves in real time.

Final thought: One of my previous columns explored writer’s block. The stream-of- consciousness approach can be a powerful antidote for the block, allowing creativity to freeflow.

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – The Pursuit of Happiness with Lemons, Ink, and Fireworks

By Andi Kopek

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Since I’ve been living in the United States, July has taken on a particular kind of symbolism. It's loud, bright, and laced with bold declarations. Fireworks blossom in the sky like punctuation marks over phrases such as “liberty” and “freedom.”

On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress ratified the final text of the Declaration of Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson. It wasn’t the start of the war (that had begun a year earlier), nor was it the end (which would come in 1783). But it was, the ideological birth certificate of a new nation. One that had cut the umbilical cord to the British Empire and declared its intention to govern itself.

A bold move. A fresh myth. A country born, literally, from the sentence. And what a sentence it was:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal... endowed with certain unalienable Rights… among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s hard not to feel something when you hear those words—especially if, like me, you grew up in a country where such phrases would have been edited out of existence by the morning censors.

Fireworks and Ghosts

Growing up in so-called communist Poland, “independence” wasn’t a holiday. It was a hope, whispered between trusted friends, unless you preferred the seclusion of solitary confinement or an endless winter in Siberia. “Freedom” wasn’t declared. It was encoded. We didn’t have parades of liberty—we had a quiet choreography of caution. You learned early to read between the lines, because that’s where the real story lived.

So every year, when July rolls around in my new home, and the sky explodes with stars and stripes, I can’t help but feel... something tangled. Gratitude, yes. Awe, sometimes. But also, a sense of skepticism. A question humming under the national anthem:

Are we truly free? Are we truly independent?

Especially as writers—as creators of meaning, challengers of narratives, recorders of the soul’s strange movements—what do these words actually mean?

Freedom vs. Independence vs. The Editor in Your Head

Let’s make a distinction.

• Freedom is a state of possibility.

• Independence is a stance—an insistence that you don’t owe your truth to anyone else’s permission.

• And auto-censorship? That’s when you stop yourself before anyone else does.

I see more and more of this creeping into American discourse. It’s subtle, often self-imposed. It wears the costume of politeness, professionalism, marketability. Often with an underpinning of fear.

Some examples:

• A writer won’t publish a story that’s too dark, too weird, or too political—because they “don’t want to get canceled.”

• A teacher won’t assign a novel that shaped them—because it might be challenged at the school board.

• A memoirist waters down the truth to make it more palatable, more “brand-friendly.”

These aren’t laws. They’re suggestions. A mandatory appendix. Ingrained mechanisms of survival in a culture of performance scores and surveillance. You stop yourself—not because you were censored, but because you feared the potential consequences.

Sound familiar?

Auto-censorship—the ugly twin of state censorship—is often harder to fight, because the gatekeeper lives inside you.

Lemons and Invisible Ink

But here’s the paradox. Here’s the secret silver lining.

In Poland, under an oppressive regime, some of the most brilliant, impactful writing of the 20th century was created. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t explicit. It was disguised. Dressed in metaphor.

Hidden behind allegory. Written, in essence, with invisible ink.

(And in case you forgot: invisible ink can be made from lemon juice.)

Poets, playwrights, novelists—they all became alchemists of subtlety. They learned how to camouflage universal truths in narratives that passed the censors. But readers knew. They always knew. Because real truth, even disguised, leaves fingerprints on the soul.

So yes, the world today is full of pressure—external and internal—to conform, to smooth the edges, to silence complexity. But as a writer, you are not helpless in the face of that. In fact, you may be even more powerful. Because restrictions can sharpen clarity, and fear, when transmuted, can become a lens.

Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness

Let me end where the Declaration began—with that shimmering phrase: “the pursuit of happiness.”

What does that mean for a writer? Not much.

I believe that writing isn’t a pursuit of happiness. It’s the embrace of discomfort, the dance with uncertainty, the slow unearthing of truths most people are too polite to mention. And if you do it right—if you do it with courage and cunning—you don’t just entertain. You preserve. You inspire. You leave something behind.

So this July, while the sky narrates independence in bursts of color, I raise a pen—not in pursuit of happiness, but in allegiance to something deeper:

The fulfillment in camouflaging permanent, universal truths for the generations to come.

A legacy not shouted, but planted. A voice not loud, but built to last.

So go collect your lemons. Write between the lines.

Never compromise.

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

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