n'examiner pas le poisson
November 6, 2002 10:16 AM

I try to stay away from the obvious commentary on this being the internet, me being a person typing, all that. I try to keep my audience personal, but at a distance, alternating between writing into a void and directly addressing people who aren't reading. I try to stay away from concepts like writer's block. It's one thing to blog about blogging, but quite another to journal about journalling. It's an offense of no small import to even use journal as a verb.

Well. To hell with that.

I'm having difficulty with this writing thing. All of a sudden.

And ordinarily I'd just pursue the reasonable person's path and not write. But, thing is, I'm floundering in other ways, too. I feel a need to address that floundering in the person of this writer's block. It's like God, addressing the ineffable in a manageable package.

It could be the season. It could be the oddly Axl Rose appropriate weather. It could be recovering from Snotvomitpalooza of last week. It could be the level of change (high) and control/direction (low) at the office. It could be the book I'm reading, or even the fact that other people take antidepressants.

Anyhow.

I am floundering. I open this page and type nothing. Sometimes unpublished drivel, sometimes simply nothing.

You suggest I get a hobby, or get away. But the things that leave me floundering aren't things I can just skip away from. You don't just quit a career. You don't need another thing to call you away when the things that call you away are already overwhelming you.

Well, maybe you do. Maybe you're dealing with the wrong things.

Or maybe you wait. I hate just feeling unsatisfied like this. But maybe what I need is to let it settle long enough to look at it up close. I mean. The second a feeling wisps out of my little metaphorical head I start trying to capture and name it.

There are cliches. Examiner le poisson. An unexamined life is not worth living. But there are also limits to what these quaint turns of phrase can tell us.