The article you'll never see

Sometimes I amaze myself. But most of the time I just bore myself silly.

Tonight I sat at my computer intending to write an article. Not this article, obviously, but an article. I had in mind to do a follow-up on last week's article, Spam eggs bacon and spam, and I was all prepared. I had a title: Spam Part II: The Sequel (redux). I had research material; I had saved all my spam emails for a week. I had a few clever lines all ready to interject into the text at the proper moment. I was ready.

I started writing. And very quickly (well, about a page into it) three things became apparent:

1. This was going to me excessively long.

2. This was going to be mind-numbingly tedious.

3. I would rather replace my insulin syringes with railroad spikes than finish the dreadful thing.

So I stopped.

Which left me with nothing to write tonight. Which brings up a question: Why do I feel I need to write something every damn night? Well, I don't write every night, but I feel guilty when I take the weekend off from blogging. Why? Couldn't I just let this go until the new year? I'm mostly doing this for my own entertainment, so why do I feel I need to be entertaining?

Well, I don't know why, I only know that I do.

So here I sit, writing an article about why I'm not writing an article. (Does this seem contradictory to you?) Obviously, at this point I'm just writing for the sake of writing, writing without point, without direction, without really understanding what or why I'm writing. When I could be writing other things...

I could always write another article about my old articles, why some of them were wrong or some of them were unfinished, but honestly I'm not in the mood to put on my trudging boots and go trudging through my literary past. Besides, my trudging boots don't fit right since I lost all those toes.

I could always write another long article about what I'm reading these days, except that I can no longer afford to buy books so I'm reading old ones and I've already blogged about them.

I could always tune in to MSNBC and see if anything infuriates me enough to write something about it, but frankly I'm not feeling all that political tonight.

There's always the Fiscal Cliff; that's always good for a few paragraphs. But I'm tired of the Fiscal Cliff. Even though there's always something new to write about it, frankly I'm tired of writing about it. I don't think I'll tackle that one again until after the first of the year, when we'll either have pulled up short of the precipice or gone over it. I'm betting on the latter.

I could always write about John Boehner doing something stupid; John Boehner is always doing something stupid and it's always fun to tell people how stupid what he's done is. Fun, perhaps, but it's getting a bit old. If he would only do something smart...now that would make an article.

I could always find fault in something Obama has done; it seems that he's always finding a way of disappointing me and I always feel compelled to point that out to everyone, as if to say "See? I was WRONG!" but I'm really in no mood to stand in front of my shortcomings (or his) and wave a red flag so that everyone notices them.

Or I could just sit in front of my computer and hope that inspiration strikes me. Although, frankly, there's about as much chance of me being struck by an idea in my living room as there is of me being hit by a locomotive in my living room.

And anyway, you'd never get a locomotive up that hill.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.