I have writer’s block. This simply means that the part of my brain that turns out new ideas of things to write about has an obstruction. How to remove such an obstruction? I saw an episode of “ALF” in which the furry alien was attempting to relieve his own writer’s block by attaching multiple clothespins to himself (he said it was a common practice on Melmac). I highly doubt this would be successful in my case. Depending on where I attach the clothespins, my pain threshold would not be very high at all, and rather than give me any ideas, this would serve only to make me very angry. No, we need another idea. In the world of sports, they say that the best remedy for a batter’s slump at the plate is to keep swinging that bat, and a basketball player can only stop his string of poor shooting by keeping up his shooting. Going on this idea, it would seem that a writer with nothing to write should just continue to write and see what happens. Let us try it out.
Speaking of blocks, I used to have two good-sized containers full of Lego building blocks. Now, children are a great deal more creative than many adults give them credit for, and many times they will play with toys in a manner not intended by the original makers of them. For instance, I used to divide my G. I. Joes up into teams and play baseball, football, and basketball with them. But to return to building blocks, my sister and I would often play with them. We had three little men that came with the blocks, and we would build houses for them (I seem to remember that two of them would sometimes share one, which has only become more disturbing with the passage of time) as well as land and airborne vehicles for their use. One of the men – for reasons I am not quite certain of – had hair that was detachable in one piece. Well, whoever had that little man at the time would occasionally take his hair off as if it were a wig and leave it outside his house to “air out” (something I assume his knobby head was doing as well). I am almost certain that the Lego people did not expect such a use of their creations.
We would also play with little toy cars – not just the Matchbox type, but all the little cars we had collected over the years. We made my room into a little town and put all the cars in the customary spots. The box the cars were stored in lay in the middle and served as the police station, hospital, and tow truck headquarters. Then there were the residences of all the other people. My bed, which was a little higher than everything else, served as the helipad for a couple helicopters that usually didn’t do much of anything. There was also a cardboard bridge my Dad had made that we put in the middle of town. This was the original “bridge to nowhere”, for it didn’t cross any water or anything else for that matter – it was just something fun to drive over.
There were also stories and running gags that we would engage in every time we played cars. One of the funniest was the policeman. His car was gigantic (so was he, we imagined), much bigger than everyone else’s, and he could arrest anyone by simply passing by their car with a “click” (our sound for handcuffs clicking into place). The unoccupied car was then left for the tow truck (whose driver hated his job and often groaned with each new assignment) to haul away. The most common offender was “the batman guy”. He drove a batmobile and loved to drive at breakneck speeds on the back dirt roads of the town (we called it “dirt driving”), which was quite illegal indeed; he never got away with it. Then there was one driver of a truck who would, every time we played, pull up outside the barbershop for a haircut. Now, the barber was very incompetent, and after a long enough interval we would have the truck pull out again, with the man inside calling out, “Thanks anyway!”
There were other amusing denizens of the car town. There were two identical ice cream trucks, which were inseparable and went out on their routes side-by-side and so close that their sides touched. If one of them were to drive on just a little farther than the other, the laggard would race ahead, screaming “I want my Bubba!” Then both would sigh a deep sigh of reunited contentment. We had an old station wagon that served as the town’s taxi. Not only was the car in such disrepair as to be painfully slow, but it also never had enough gas to get where it was going, and invariably it would break down within feet of the gas station (which, I believe, was also the ice cream store). There were two ambulances (they looked more like 1980s “A-Team” vans) which, whenever they went out on a call, would play a song (not unlike a real ice cream truck) of our own invention, called “9-1-1 Emergency”.
I am one of the few fortunate brothers who have been successful in getting their little sisters to play with G. I. Joes (in a military role) with them. Even so, these sessions would not last very long, and we were hardly ever able to get a battle in before she wanted to stop. We would split the guys up between us and have opposing “camps”. An inviolable tradition was to have each side give the other side one of their own men as a prisoner of war before hostilities could be planned or begun. We also had another game we played with all of my larger action figures (which included everyone from Pee-Wee Herman to Superman to He-Man to the Riddler). We called it “King’s Men”. Captain Hook was the king and his throne was a gold-colored trophy. The main point of the game was to have all the men in the king’s court engage in all manner of intrigue, conspiracy, gunfights, duels, assassination attempts, swordfights, and fisticuffs. It was really very much a boy’s game, but I think my sister sometimes enjoyed it almost as much as I did.
Well, it seems my approach worked after all, didn’t it? I began to write and was able to produce something halfway coherent. Writer’s block has been vanquished for now, but I have to think of what I will write next – which may not be so easy.
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