Sometimes I sit, staring at a computer screen which appears to have frozen, my fingers resting, idly, on a keyboard which appears to be not a real one but a plastic model on which the keys are fixed and immovable. I toss up ideas for a catchy title in my head ('God is dead'?, nah, been done), but each one seems more trite and humorless than the one before. I wonder idly whether other bloggers on HuffPo think of the title first or write the blog first, sort of like whether the music or the lyrics comes first.
Nothing comes to mind. Perhaps I could write about having writer's block. No, talk about trite. Every writer writes about having writer's block in order to get through a writer's block, your readers, both of them, expect better from you. Perhaps if I write about other writers writing about writer's block ... no come on, pull yourself together, you are getting hysterical.
I gaze out of the window - global warming, no did two on that last week, got to do something fresh, otherwise I will become that boring drunk in the corner of the bar with his conspiracy theories about 9/11, the one everybody avoids. I make a cup of coffee, and if I still smoked cigarettes I would smoke another cigarette, but I don't so I don't.
Keyboard and screen still frozen, icy white like the Alaskan wilderness before the oil wells arrive. I read some Cenk Uygur and Molly Ivins and Garrison Keiller and Jane Smiley and Chris Cooper for inspiration. Get depressed with renewed feelings of inadequacy instead. Go for a drive on a long and winding road.
Ah, and it comes, a catchy, brilliant title, some homespun stories about my daughters when they were little girls, terrific analogy leading in to some deep and meaningful insights about the meaning of life and the universe, and a guide and a beacon to all progressives everywhere in the world. Yes, I shout, both palms banging down on the steering wheel, that's it, the best blog I've ever written, hell, possibly the greatest blog anyone has written anywhere in 2006, and it's all mine. Traffic lights. I scramble for pencil, paper, nothing, anything, old bus ticket or parking ticket, anything, a used Kleenex. Nothing, not a single scrap of paper in this damn car, cleaned by wife yesterday, I recall now. The lights change and I drive on. Faster now, got to get home.
And then I do, and rush to the computer, fingers poised over the keyboard like they were over the steering wheel, ready to crash down in a symphony of words. And? And nothing, it has gone, the whole thing. Like waking up from a dream in which you have written a great novel, only to lose it with the morning sun. Fragments remain, the stories of the cute girls, but what was that an analogy for? Can't remember, gone again.
So it seems I am bound forever to either sit in front of an empty screen, or compose a blog in my mind while driving, but never the two in combination. Perhaps if Arianna was to issue me with a communication device downloading straight into HuffPo from my car. No, not likely.
OK, pull yourself together, what are you going to write about today ...?