Blank

“Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”

~Unknown





I sit down for the fifth time and wonder where the witty commentary went. Why, it truly is possible to sit and stare at this device, fully eager and prepared to write, and then find that when the time has arrived to fill the blank space--its inevitably the hardest thing on earth to accomplish. Just one word?? Something?

A myriad of excuses clot my thinking into a jelly-like, brownish-blue glob that gets stuck somewhere between my brain and my fingers. Nothing happens. I stare. I fidget. I convince myself of something or other that prohibits me from communicating the written, or typed, word. No matter how much I want to, its stuck in me for yet another day.

I havent written about the marathon yet. Why? The classic response that I hear emanating from my own mouth is "I didnt have time." That there is a load of hooey. I have a million thoughts about the run across the lava, in the middle of nowhere, at 4000 feet with 182 other freaks of nature, but sitting down and writing about it feels impossible. Ironman was SO overwhelming, SO amazing I couldnt wait. It was like a bomb going off inside of me. The only thing about Ironman was that it took almost 13 hours to complete and was really a novels worth of emotional and physical extremes. The marathon was certainly a rare and wonderful event that many people will never experience (fewer than Ironman for sure) and yet its not so pressing for me to discuss here. How strange, because I truly loved doing it and cant wait to share.

Writers block. I think that is what I am experiencing. Wealth of ideas, lack of motivation to clarify them as written words. And boredom with the sound of my own "voice."

One of the things I love about blogging is the fact that a few degrees of separation are all that exists between most of the world, out there, and this blog. Its creepy how many people are just one, two or three clicks from being right HERE, reading this crap. And it really is. Some one once asked TS Eliot if college professors stifled budding writers. He replied that they do not stifle enough, and that there are many a best seller out there that did not have to exist if along the way some poor author had, indeed, been stifled.

Some of us stifle ourselves, I suppose.

Cheers.