The road to hell is paved with adverbs

Ugh, I have writer’s block, and I’m not kidding you… it’s like all of the voices in my head have gone on strike. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m sitting in traffic or reading the news, they sound like they’re at a Cubs game. Only they don’t swear like sailors. They enunciate… like fucking ladies. But then, when I sit at the keyboard, nothing. Maybe Groucho Marx was right. Maybe, “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” I just don’t know.

That said, I DO know that it took me five hours to write the paragraph you just read – not the whole post, JUST the intro. In other words, I spent approximately one hour on each line. No wonder prisoners call jail time a sentence. But I digress. 

The point is that I’ve had writer’s block before. Only when it happened, I could get on my mental merry-go-round and eventually find something to say. This time it’s different. This time I find myself counting the number of times the cursor flashes (I made it to 927 once - yes, really) or thinking about songs with the same beat (for the record, the only two that work are your ABCs and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star). 

When neither of those techniques worked, I ended up Googling tips for dealing with writer's block. One blog said, “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everyone’s just doing the best they can.” To which I said to myself, “Self, that cannot be true. You cannot be the only person on this planet doing the bare minimum to get by most days.” And that’s when I began wondering - what did real writers do when this happened to them? Can you imagine Hemingway, sitting there with a bottle of absinthe, thinking, “I’m blocked. This typewriter deserves to die, alone, in the rain.” Or better yet, Dorothy Parker, whom I love beyond words (no pun intended), and who actually once said, “I’m not a writer with a drinking problem. I’m a drinker with a writing problem.” 

I don’t know, maybe that’s it. Maybe I need a scandalous vice. The current ones - doughnuts, reading, and running are closer to Hunger Games, the home edition, than inspiration. In fact, I would argue that jogging in the heat has crushed my will to live. Seriously, by the end of mile zero, I’m ready to hang up my shoes and call it a day. But do I? Yes, sometimes I do, but not always, and you would think there would be SOME return on investment for that. But is there? No. Unless a runner’s high feels like a stroke, I have NO idea what they’re talking about. Instead, I disdainfully slog through it, come home, stink, and stare at a blinking cursor.  

And I promise you on all that is holy, on more than one occasion, I have put the curse into cursor, especially last week, when I posted, This Amp goes to Eleven, and Blogger decided to crash on me. For those of you who read it, thank you. You know who you are. For those of you who visited mkromd only to find nothing, sorry. I’m still trying to figure out what happened. Either way, talk to you later… hopefully :)