Better Lame than Never

I thought of that headline two days ago, and I still don’t know what I’m going to write.

Oh dear, here’s an odd thing. Usually once I put pen to paper, words just magically come out. Today not so much. A similar thing happened yesterday. A short post was the result. Not that that’s a bad thing.

I won’t say I’ve got Writer’s Block. For one thing, it’s more like Writer’s Blank. I’ll never forget one time in a restaurant I was reading a book called On Writer’s Block by Victoria Nelson (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) (A really good book, by the way). This kind of scummy looking older woman asked me why I was reading it and I, rather stupidly (I admit), said it was because I had writer’s block.

“The cure for writer’s block is to write,” she said in a smug tone of voice. “You just write.”

To this day I wish I had said, “How many books have you written?” in a respectful, interested tone of voice. I’m thinking she wrote a lot of stupid journals and bad poetry. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that; I write stupid journals and bad poetry myself. It can be fun. But it’s nothing to be smug about.

And that brings me to another memory of a writer (thinking of bad poetry, not being smug). When I was in college about a hundred years ago, I noticed that the school paper often printed poems by this girl whose name now escapes me. I did not admire her poetry. It was the kind of stuff many of us wrote when we were young: basically our thoughts, feelings or observations with the line breaks in poetry-like places. Full disclosure: I wrote quite a bit of it myself. I was not as prolific as this girl, but I thought my stuff was better (it probably wasn’t but as I have no examples of either to hand I can’t say which was worse).

Eventually I met the girl. She was so nice! And very cool, a definite personality. I certainly did not tell her I didn’t like her poetry. That wouldn’t be nice, and after all, it’s all a matter of taste. And it may have led her to say something disparaging about mine. When poetry came up, she said, “Oh, I write all the time. Journals and journals, poems and poems.” I don’t remember the exact quote, but I’m pretty sure of the phrase “journals and journals.” It impressed me. I had never been able to stick with writing a journal (journaling wasn’t a verb in those days, and it was a good decade and a half before the TV Journal). Prolificness always impresses me (I don’t think prolificness is really a word, but you know what I mean). I strive for it and always fall short.

But here is an encouraging thought for me: I am approaching 200 blog posts. That means I have written something every day for almost 200 days. Perhaps I could become prolific in my old age, or maybe even my middle age (where I am now, I think). Even though some of my posts have been pretty lame (Lame Post Friday, anyone?). Now how do you like that? By babbling on and following my stream of consciousness (babbling brook of consciousness?), I’ve come right back and made my silly headline appropriate. Bring on the weekend!