I have writer’s block again. Here I sit, without one drop of the stuff they call “creative juices” flowing into or out of any portion of my being, figuratively or otherwise. I wish “creative juices” came in a can, like an energy drink, or as an ointment, like Vicks Vapo-Rub. The box of the Alpha-Bits cereal I ate the other day said the cereal was good for brain development, but it’s hard to tell because I don’t know if my brain is still developing or not. So, in the absence of any effective miracle substance, I will try to alleviate my problem the way I did the first time – by just writing and seeing what happens.
Speaking of energy drinks, I see many people in my age group drinking them, especially at college. I never drink the stuff, and my personal opinion is that energy drinks are some of the worst liquids you can put in your body. But I am the same one who gets a weird feeling from drinking a cup of caffeinated coffee and who once had a bad reaction to green tea extract – so maybe I just can’t handle stimulants of any kind. In any case, I still can’t see why one would need to constantly guzzle something in a long ugly can just to keep himself sharp all day. Last time I checked, the formula for a good day’s worth of energy is a sound night’s sleep the night before and three square meals throughout the day. But again, that’s just me.
I do use Vicks Vapo-Rub on occasion, or at least an off-brand version of it. If I’m all stuffed up or coughing, I spread a little on my chest and upper lip before I go to bed, in hopes that the strange-smelling eucalyptus vapors will soothe whatever it is that’s ailing me. I have to say it has varying results. My mom read something that said it would work wonders if you rubbed it on the bottoms of your feet and then put your socks on before bed, but that has done absolutely nothing for me any of the times I’ve tried it. But maybe the fact that I can’t feel my feet has something to do with it.
Some readers may be wondering about my Alpha-Bits cereal reference. Isn’t that a kids’ cereal? Well, yes, I suppose it is. My mom got it for us because she liked the fact that it has less sugar than Honey Nut Cheerios. The cereal pieces are letters and they are semi-sweet. I have so far resisted the urge to spell something or construct a sentence with my food, mainly because there is an overabundance of certain letters (especially vowels) and an extreme shortage of others (I have yet to see a Q or a V in any of the bowls I have eaten). Then there is the fact that many of the letters are wildly misshapen or broken. One might hope that eating letters for breakfast might cure my writer’s block, because those letters would go up into my brain and come out through my fingers as I type. So far that has not been the way it works.
It really stinks to have writer’s block. I suspect it is as unpleasant to read an article written under the influence of writer’s block as it is to write one in such a condition. But creativity can’t be rushed, or rubbed, or ingested, or eaten. It can’t be forced, or injected, or paid for, or bribed. It can’t even be faked, or fabricated, or substituted, or forged. It’s either there or it isn’t, and when it comes, it is a happy time for a writer. I have been able to dash off an article within an hour and a half when some inspiration or another takes a firm hold of my mind. But right now no inspiration exercises even a dying fish’s grasp on my mental faculties, and I believe said faculties may lose all grasp of anything if I don’t regain my writerly equilibrium.
But that is why I am writing this in the first place. The hope that by writing I may regain the lost holy grail of inspiration spurs me onward despite the starkly real risk that I will alienate generations of readers with one bad article. A writer must write, and when said writer has not turned out an original article since the previous week, his public demands that he does so. So here I sit, writing in the narrowest sense of the term.
What might I get in return? My only hope is that any comments left here will be disguised with at-signs, exclamation points, and number and percent signs; I couldn’t bear to know my public’s thoughts in their true form. My fingers have gotten a workout, though a nasty case of arthritis may infest my knuckles and joints before long for all that. But, alas, ‘tis all I can manage at the moment; how long my malaise will last is as unclear as the origin of the Stonehenge. Until then, I regret to inform my readers, who never did anything to deserve this, that they will have to put up with my sound and fury, signifying nothing, until it passes. For now, I am a literary wanderer in unending search of that which eludes me – a subject.
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