Around the Block

On writer's notes from a writer's block

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Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash

I.

Something about the term “writer’s block” feels twee, so I don’t like to deploy it. Even when it would be the most appropriate thing to say. “I have writer’s block.” I end up saying substantially worse things in my endeavor to work around it. Things like, “the words just aren’t coming.” Okay, big guy. 

Whatever it’s called, the ordeal is tinged with melodrama. In my mind, to declare that one is suffering from writer’s block feels a bit gauche, feels like revealing that one really sees oneself as an artiste. “O, why can’t I create!” And so on. I do see myself that way, but it’s impolite to acknowledge it, I think. 

Regardless, I find myself unable to write. I’ve been here before, but each bout with wordlessness feels unique, feels more final than last time, more serious, always accompanied by a cruel sort of amnesia: I can’t recall how I’ve overcome it in the past.

Looking up potential solutions makes me feel worse. “Writer’s block” exists at the evil intersection of “writing advice” and “wellness.”

Seeking counsel on the internet invariably leads one to a blogpost with a brightly lit stock photo containing a notebook, or a pencil, or a cup of coffee, or a wadded-up piece of paper, or some combination of those things, followed by a list of suggestions like “1. Just write!”

I feel like an incel.

Maybe that’s what I should do. Maybe I should “just write.” I’ll use this document to do so. I’m not sure anything worthwhile will come of it, but at the very least it can serve as a log, and if I end up getting around this block, maybe I can look back at it for comfort, as a way of remembering.

II.

The problem is that writer’s block is itself a cliche afflicted upon a person whose symptoms include thinking exclusively in cliches. I tried to write about anxiety, about the physical experience of a loud, thumping heart in the chest today. I rummaged through the toolbox. What have we got?

We’ve got a heart that races. A heart that flutters. A heart that pounds, jumps, slams, skips. Done, done, done to death! The heart should do something entirely new. The heart should go on a vacation it can’t quite afford. The heart should oversleep and miss its flight. The heart should get its ass up and vote. 

Or maybe the issue is that addressing the heart at all in matters pertaining to anxiety is overdone. Maybe there’s some other telltale body part that could do the job in a more interesting way. How does, for example, the pancreas feel about anxiety? Has the coccyx nothing to say? Will it speak?

I hate it here.

III.

On top of everything else, I’ve begun to compulsively notice pigeons’ feet. Once you start noticing pigeons’ feet, it’s impossible to stop. It’s a source of great daily tragedy for me. 

There’s a variety of maladies that can befall pigeons’ feet. Well, it’s always one foot. Probably because a pigeon with two damaged feet is simply a dead pigeon. There are limits, of course, to what can be endured.

But the pigeons with one bad foot, I see them everywhere now. Some of the damaged feet are clearly due to some sort of pox; warty, ballooned, infected. Others are sliced up with missing toes, or missing altogether. I saw a pigeon yesterday dragging an entire limp, deflated leg behind it, all the while maintaining that dumb, glassy pigeon look in its eyes. 

I looked it up. It’s often string or even human hair that’s the culprit. There’s not much hay or straw in urban environments to make nests out of, and so pigeons will get tangled up in certain fibers while trying to collect them. This makes me even sadder. 

The wounded pigeons do not share the intensity of my emotions for their plight, it seems. The wounded pigeon comports its business as usual, bobbing its head, turning to look at things out of one side of its face, cooing, and such. Stupid, or noble? 

Actually, I’m the less intelligent creature. Things can be overthought. Thinking can be a blight. The pigeon should look upon me with pity. “Oh, mankind, that poor, thinking reed,” the wounded pigeon might say, “all wound up for nothing, as usual. Coo!” Then it might take to the sky, an unthinking miracle it performs quite casually on a regular basis. 

IV. 

Writing goes well beyond putting words on a page. Writing is a daily romance. When the romance is good, everything is lyrical, everything has utility. A good writing day can come and go with nothing making it to ink. 

A good writing day can be a day in which little more happens than seeing a woman in an eccentric outfit ambling down the aisle of the bus, chunky rings on her fingers, cat eye glasses perched on top of her head, and although she’s festooned like a Macy’s Day Parade float there’s a dogged determination in her eyes and her movements. She’s on a mission. 

Where is she going? The thought is illustrated with faces and aches and the sort of unhappy compromises that are dull and frustrating in real life but appear poignant and insightful on the page to the reader. It’s like that for the writer, too, before it gets written down. Poignant, insightful, for the mere act of noticing. The noticing often feels more important and productive than the writing. 

It doesn’t have to be a person. When the romance is good, everything sings like that, everything brims with private life, waiting to be tapped and collected and used. Everything, everything, even trash, the way it heaps up on the curb, or signals neglect or carelessness, or provides evidence that someone in the recent past was standing right here, eating Sour Patch Kids. 

Maybe that’s why “writer’s block” feels so petulant, feels like being a crying child at the fair surrounded by blinkering lights and carnival rides and funnel cakes. Yes, you see, I’m upset, I’m crossing my arms, I’m stamping my feet, because it all should be fun. 

V.

There is a world in which I seriously research the phenomenon of writer’s block and find some kernel of truth about it and use that to power some marketable project, like a self-contained six-episode podcast called “The Block,” maybe. 

That’s the other thing with this poisonous way of thinking. It feels like I can only see things as projects, as mere beginnings, middles, and ends with a byline, an announcement on social media, a rating of stars, and then, the moving on. 

What do I want any of this to give me, what do I want it to do? It feels like I’ve forgotten how to walk. 

VI. 

My latest hobby is taking electronic readings of my own heart, which, seemingly out of the blue, I started regularly and vividly imagining exploding in my chest. This is not related whatsoever to my previous struggles to write about an anxious heart. My anxious heart predates my experiences with language. 

I have a little device for this, a plastic pad upon which I place my fingers, and an app that measures my heart in peaks and valleys. I wait 30 seconds for its verdict, and these 30 seconds are at least filled with something.

I suppose it’s less of a hobby and more of a compulsion. I try to locate exactly where the pleasure or catharsis in this ritual is. It’s not in receiving the reading, which usually affirms that I have a regular heartbeat, but has, on more than a few occasions, declared it “unclassified,” registered it as below 60 BPM, which is a bit troubling, yes. 

The pleasure, or, rather, the balm, I think, is in the big idea of being tended to by a gadget, by cold, unfeeling technology. I think I want an objective arbiter in my life, unmoved by emotion, to tell me I’m alright. God?

Probably not. It requires batteries, and doesn’t work so well when near a laptop. 

VII. 

The Olympics are happening. I think this is the first Olympics that absolutely no part of my brain is paying attention to. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, but it probably doesn’t matter.

I’ve let my hair grow long, or long for me, anyway. I can’t imagine myself any other way now. It’s funny how quickly a new image of one’s self can emerge, and so immediately be considered indispensable, how the governing logic that once drove me to the barber shop every two weeks can dissipate out of nowhere and be usurped. 

People change, both gradually and suddenly, in accordance with their own inner physics, and sometimes I feel like little more than a constant chemical reaction, a living, breathing equation I don’t understand. I’m really bad at math, and always have been. 

Sometimes, and I will continue to be a bit petulant here, bratty, I feel awfully trapped in me.

It feels unfair that I can’t simply be someone else. I think it would be a lot of fun to throw open the doors of a dive bar in Cincinnati as “Harold,” or “Norah,” always heterosexual, exotic to me, always taller or shorter, always with an entirely different suite of concerns than my own, emphases on things I’d never think to emphasize, because I’m so beholden to my own values, in the mathematical sense of the word. 

Harold? Norah? Cincinnati? So this is as far as my imagination goes. Sad state of affairs. 

VIII.

There are days when I locate my problem as both a writer and a semi-public figure, broadly speaking, in not being quite crazy enough. It seems to me that people who solve the problem of being ordinary do so by being wildly delusional. 

To consider one’s self a writer in the first place, to believe you have something to say, and that it’s worth saying and hearing, is a bit absurd, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t go all the way with it. I don’t see the point in hedging.

I must confess that I’m more interested in the firebrands, the loopy people, than I am in, say, the authors with cautiously guarded brands who never let anyone down, whose work is so reliably important or so needed. Privately, I only really pay attention to the troublemakers. Maybe I envy them.

Sometimes I resent the warm, soft, rounded adjectives people give me. Heartfelt. Vulnerable. Empathetic. Sometimes I want to be sharp, nasty, wicked. I think maybe the latter category of adjectives is truer to me than the former, which must mean I’m being duplicitous somewhere, either in my writing, or out and about.

I think this extends to the rest of my life, too. There are instincts that should be heeded, but aren’t, because I’m afraid. Is there something to that idea, one that I often see articulated in those self-sure lists of advice on the internet, that writer’s block has a strong relationship with fear? 

Isn’t that what writer’s block is? The paralyzing suspicion that you’re ordinary? Most people are afraid to be what they are. I think that’s what makes writing scary. I could say everything I’m afraid to say, all the incendiary thoughts in my head. But I’m not afraid to intentionally reveal anything. I’m afraid of unintentionally revealing something, flashing my true self, unknown to me, by accident. 

I can’t help but think that extraordinary people don’t worry about such things. 

IX.

Maybe everything is fine. Maybe everything is working the way it should. I can still arrange words perfectly well. I just put my EKG reader in a drawer. It’s suddenly chilly and gray out, like fall, even though it’s early August. I’m getting better at chess, which I play online every single day. I can still learn things. I can improve. I have time.

I’m going fishing next week on Lake Superior. Lakes, I believe, have healing properties. I can’t wait to stare out at a placid body of water and forget myself: in the quiet waiting, in the refracted light on the water’s surface. If something tugs my line, that’s great, too. But I’m more excited to have my thoughts and attention arranged in the shape of fishing. I’m excited to be patient.

X.

Conclusion.