Writer’s Block

No. I don’t have the answers. No, I cannot tell you how to find your muse. I think mine up and packed her bags, making some flippant comment about going and “Chenying” myself, and is now greasing up some pencilneck who will make millions writing cut-and-paste romance novels or perhaps adding literary content to Pringle’s cans.

I remember when I was young, it was so easy to write–or type–what have you, even if the most awesome of inspirational works manifest themselves spontaneously while I was walking down the street sans a pen and paper or, Heavens forbid, a tape recorder. While young and filled with piss and vinegar and filled with the willful youthful angst, I could write about the attractiveness of suicide or the preferred option of believing in life aeternal, or I could fill volumes questioning that magickal thing called “Love” and I filled pages with my wisdom pertaining to God and His/”His”/Its/Her/”Her” nature.

Now I’m a grown-up and Love is nothing magickal at all but a fairy tale at worst or a rush of hormones at best, with the notion of a biochemical reaction put in place by evolutionary chance to encourage those brutish hominids to take care of their offspring–and for a moment when I think of my dayjob as a retail clerk I think many-a mother has had thoughts of offering up her screamer to the first passing ravenous wolf…

Writing was easy, when I was a philosopher king, a.k.a. a teenager who by the grace of God’s twisted sense of humor and the merit of being young and (not so) wise knew everything. (For everyone knows that sometime between the ages of 14 and 17 a lad or lady gains an indeniable omniscience, but for most, somewhere between the ages of 18 and 24 the realization sets in that we know squat and that maybe, just maybe, Mom and Dad weren’t as outright inbred and retarded as we had thought.

As an adult, I find myself living in a world where everything is “P.C.” and it is no longer to call a turd a turd, and truth–what did Orwell say about it?–oh yes, the telling of it is something revolutionary–and cognitive dissonance is the norm. Why yes, thank you, Mr. Swift, I do think the Dunces are strategically confederated against me at times. It’s okay to be a backbiter, but don’t talk about Love at work, don’t write your real thoughts about your place of employment down if they might through obscure channels track it down, and don’t you dare criticize popular governing and its all-too-corrupt handmaidens. (What’s the male equivalent of a handmaiden? Is there such a thing as a footmaiden?)

Goethe, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Hunter Thompson, Stephen King–all but one are forever gone, and of them all there can only be one of them–stale mimicry will not do. Smoking pot is illegal and juvenile, gone even before the muse packed her bags. Used to have cigarette in hand as I composed, but now I live in a smokefree household and don’t really want to continue that nasty habit. Other drugs and alcohol even caused too much scrambling of the head center to even construct a coherent paragraph besides.

An active imagination does wonders for some, and served to inspire for a long time–but then I found myself imagining success and imagining accomplishment as opposed to ever actually engaging in any successful accomplishments. To write, they say, know the subject matter… Outside of the topic of writing, Socrates is perhaps most notable to most, besides being an abductee to Bill and Ted, as saying, “Know Thyself”. Well, unfortunately, I know myself (and sometimes yeah, being single, too much in the biblical meaning of the phrase) better than most people will ever know themselves–but I’ve wasted so much time on notions of “Love” and “God” and “Knowing thyself” that somewhere along the line I failed to do anything all that remarkable and I’ve failed to truly interact with enough great souls in any real meaningful manner. “Who has the time,” one might rationalize, “to do all these things when they want to write?” and likewise and ironically enough, “who has the time to write when you’re busy doing all these things?”

I wonder, then, why did God gift me (at times) with the passion and desire to write, with only an inkling of the actual gift, in a day and age when two-syllable words are too-polysyllabic for the average schmoe who hasn’t read anything since that hard to read novel by Dr. Seuss in the 4th grade, anyway? Come to think of it, Mr Geisel’s name should be up there in that aforementioned list of literary greats. Sigh. (I’ve been known to actually utter the word, and not just say it, I think it comes from a life of comic book and comic strip reading). “AAAAAAAAAAARGH!” –Charlie Brown.

Seriously, though, look at how literarily lazy we’ve become. “Pornography”, for example, comes from the Greek meaning something like “writings about harlots” and today–who reads pornography? It’s graphic video in your face man! (And a soft ironic voice mutters, “Ick. give me a kleenex please.”)

In all seriousness, though, as if I could ever be, or simultaneously be anything but, I can’t help but ask, where did it all go? Where did that inspiration to be a literary master go?