Sunday, October 01, 2006

Blogger's block 2: 60 to zero in 10 seconds

All right now. This is getting serious.

Reflecting Light has been up for one year now and I have nothing to say before sentence is pronounced, or even mispronounced if cliché is not your native language. The highwayman has pointed his pistol at me and ordered me to hand over all my volubles. What's yours is yours and what's mine is mime, leaving me speechless.

I have truly made de grade, and been made degraded. Is anything lower for a blogger than posting about being blocked? It's like a first novelist turning out 100,000 words about How I Suffered as an Adolescent.

Sleep won't come, except to my readers. My dry wit has run wet. I need to be told, every hour on the hour, that it happens to all bloggers. I need to be told comfortingly, "There, there." But as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no there, there.

The problem is not that I no longer imagine anybody cares what I have to say about anything. It's that I no longer care what I have to say. I read a news story and know with a crushing certainty that someone else has already commented on it, and better than I could.

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside, immobile with the blogger's blues again?

If nothing else, I hope I have at least left you in suspense as I suspend misjudgment until the next posting.

2 comments:

sfw said...

Hi Rick

I think of a million things to blog about but when I sit down to write my mind seems to go blank. That's why I end up with short pieces to linked articles.Hope you get your mojo back.

Steve

Rick Darby said...

Thank you, Bill. I appreciate your comment. I'm fairly confident this nonproductive phase will pass. One symptom is that I have become overly self-critical about my writing. It's good for a blogger to be his own critic and editor, because there's no one else to tell him when he's being repetitious or trite. But not to the point of inducing paralysis by holding himself to impossibly high standards.