Stuck.

I'm in Little Rock again. It's all overcast skies and chilly weather here, genuinely deciduous flora (as opposed to New Orleans), and an amazing buffet of old friends and good conversations. I have a bad cold that's preventing me from doing much this morning besides sit inside my friend Jared's house, pal around with a cute dog, and try to write.

Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time doing that either (the writing), and I'm unclear why. I don't know about the rest of you, but lately I feel there's this strangling vine of narcissism that's grown wild over the facade of my mind and largely obscured the outside world from my view. The vine has always been present to varying degrees, but it's grown more and more voluminous over time. Nowadays, its mirrored fronds block virtually all of the light outside. It's a good thing to be aware of the room you live in, but the main focus has to be on the view from the window or else you'll start to go crazy. I'm trying to write, and the only thing I can talk about is me, me, me. Like right now. Bad news.

Home for the Holidays

So I come back to the old blogstead in the hopes of reclaiming something else in life that isn't my job, and I try to think of something to throw out there. Anything. Maybe I could talk about a funny craigslist ad. Maybe I could do the thing where I dwell on an insignificant piece of personal minutia or passing faux pas and pretend like I think it's really important. Maybe I could concoct a zany scenario in which Kim Jong-il's heart failure happened while we were having sex or something, hell, everybody, I don't KNOW. Anything.

Any topic I try to write about makes me feel like a washed up prop comic whipping out oversized rolls of toilet paper and various jolly hats to a stoney-faced crowd fresh off the casino buffet, my rigor mortis grin pleading for forced laughs with the unhinged desperation of a famine victim

It's hard to start writing on a blog again after a long absence. Well, it's hard to write anything after not doing so for awhile, but a blog is especially susceptible to inertia. I think that's because the only unique redeeming quality inherent to the medium lies in its property of developing a relationship through slow, real-time accrual. Whatever premeditation there may be at the outset of the project is soon subsumed into the subtle patterns that develop post-by-post. Taken over time, it's maybe an opportunity for a more unfiltered type of self-expression than any other writing. The posts themselves may be carefully edited for this or that purpose, but (like in conversation) you can't keep your actual self from showing up in the interstices. With each post and each comment, the rhythm of something organic develops, and it's this organic quality that gives the form any hope of being interesting.

But a blog is always less a fully differentiated, wriggling eukaryote than it is a haphazardly sprawled colony of vaguely interdependent cells. The resulting shape is lumpy, awkward, and grossly asymmetrical, and if not continually shoved along by one post and then another and another it tends to get lodged in the divots and crannies of the work week. Look out along the road and see them stretching on for miles, the dead hulks of blogs perfectly preserved, placid, and mired to the ground as intractably as glacial boulders.

What would you like to know? Give me a topic and I'll go with it.