I was thinking this evening, while clearing dinner’s dirty dishes out of the sink and listening to the Redskins begin what’s looking like will be another in a long line of miserable games, about writer’s block. Specifically, the kind of writer’s block in which you’re not really blocked, so to speak, but rather overcome by an overwhelming urge to do anything but. You have the ideas, but not the desire, which seems ridiculous no matter how you look at it. I mean, the ideas are supposed to be the hard part, right? Why should sitting down and typing them be so damned difficult?
I blame the Internet. Well, not entirely, but a little at least. It’s just too easy to get distracted. I mean, you’re sitting there at your computer, a blank Word document open in front of you and that cursor mocking you with its steady blinking in the corner, and what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You click over to Firefox and jump to CNN, or to Fark, or to Duotrope, or to any one of about a thousand other websites that then pull you into their time-sucking embrace. And if it’s not the Internet, it’s something else. Washing the dishes. Doing laundry. Catching up on some reading. Playing video games. Waking the dog from her couch-bound slumber for a game of fetch. Cleaning the bathroom.
You know it’s bad when you’re cleaning the bathroom.
I know that I’m not the only one with this problem. But knowing that there are others out there struggling with his same issue – and I’m pretty sure that there are lots of writers out there struggling with this issue – is hardly comforting. Why is it that something from which we derive so much enjoyment and personal satisfaction is often so hard to even minimally do? Is, in fact, something that we’ll actually invent work to get out of doing? It makes absolutely no sense. It is, in fact, a sort of masochism, a type of self-inflicted punishment. And, afterward, as you surrender and make your way to bed, comes the gnawing guilt. The sinking realization that you’ve lost a half hour, an hour, an entire evening’s worth of time that you could have been using to write. It’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s just how I’m feeling right now as the Redskins go even further into the hole. Seventeen zip and the game’s not half over.
But you know what? You know what I just realized? I’m writing right now. That’s crazy. That’s meta-crazy. Here I am, lamenting my guilt-ridden writer’s block through a multi-paragraph blog post.
Ah, the Internet. Like Homer Simpson’s beer, it is truly the cause – and cure – of all our problems. And the Redskins just scored, so there’s hope.