Empty Tabernacle

One way to escape this world and to appreciate emotional truths of it at the same time is to write fiction, another way to escape is drinking or to smoke weed or take on even harder stuff. The healthiest of all these options is probably hallucinogens.

For whatever reason, like a disease, the writer strives to keep on writing, even though, in comparing it to drugs, often the act of writing is stale or old and doesn't take and the trip is without value.

I had set aside today, my only day off this week, to put down a thousand or even a couple thousand words for a parody story of the founding of America I'm writing about a pirate during the Revolutionary War. I haven't written a word all day long. I've watched football, talked on the phone to a lady friend and drank a few beers with some friends outside in the cool weather under the sun of their back lawn sitting in rocking chairs measured at six feet apart from one another. If anyone were to ask me what I did today I'd tell them what I consider to be true, that I was trying to write. The entire day, like Moses wandering through a barren desert with the pressure of thousands of followers, my mind trekked down the images of this cropless story I want to write so bad, all day long, without putting down one decent sentence to prove my worth, on my day off, the days we supposedly live for and long for and hope for and strive for.

There’re ways to overcome writer's block I've been told. Reading will help. I like cross reading, nonfiction--Jon Meacham's pretty good I think and Harold Bloom is a great writer of literary analysis, books of poetry by Frank X. Walker and Matsuo Basho typically mesmerize my heart bound toward the tracks of inspiration, old poetry considered canon--Dante and Milton and Homer and clips of Shakespeare and the Bible, and interviews--the Paris Review has some good ones and so does Lit Hub and so does Belieiver Magazine. "On Becoming a Novelist" by John Gardner is something of a spiritual reading for the writer. Music is likely to inspire visions worth putting down but this is a theory and it works sometimes but it's not the Messiah of freedom from being unable to write. I believe David Lynch, in the 90's, was obsessed with the art of mediocre commercials and I too every so often will spend some time watching commercials I remember fulfilling something of my soul or mind or senses. Sometimes writing poetry for fun works and sometimes it does not. The same is true with trying to learn how to draw. Cigarettes, driving around for a half-hour-or-so without direction and multiple showers are always an option to strike up ideas and sentences in the mind's eye but they are in no means an approach to come down an absolute trail towards the Word.

In truth the decaying loss of creativity and productivity is like a shadow that rises each morning with the fire of the sun. Every day, every sentence is a struggle, as it were the stuff of suffering. If I've ever beaten or overcome the emptiness that is what is called Writer's Block, I can't remember the day I did. All I can say is that I know it awful well. I can't help you if you're way down there in the depths of it, but I can feel the pain of it that you endure. I’ve been there and am always there, as though I'm chained to it, a prisoner of words. I can't help you, but if you need a cigarette or to hear an inappropriate joke or a poem to read, well, at least I'm down there with you.