In Case of Emergency, Hit Publish

Sometimes coffee is not the miracle one is hoping for.

Full disclosure: This is a Middle-aged Musings post I’m writing with no real plan as to when to post it. I thought it might be useful to have a spare column kicking about, in case of emergency.

It is Monday as I write this. Many people do not sleep well Sunday night. I’m one of them. One can temporarily overcome the deficiency with coffee. Coffee also has mood-boosting properties, which I, for one, find welcome. Sometimes not so much.

Well, at my age (middle), one does not lightly abandon an old friend after a disappointment. Besides, it still tasted good.

My second musing for the day is: sometimes the Write It Anyways philosophy works. I wrote a whole post on Saturday about how I could not write a post about my intended topic. I felt even worse on Sunday but was too embarrassed to admit it could happen to me two days in a row. The result was perhaps not brilliant but perfectly acceptable.

A small side note about the post: my sticking point was the first sentence. I wanted something less mundane than “We went here and did this.” And I felt quite incapable of going on to the second sentence and writing the first one later. Sunday, I accepted the mundane. There’s some half-baked philosophy lurking around there somewhere, but I’ll save that for Lame Post Friday.

Getting back to the Write It Anyways school of thought, I drove to work this morning feeling dry as a bone, writing-wise. I was even composing in my head a lead of “Sorry, kids, it’s Middle-aged Musings Monday.” Then when I sat down with my notebook (I had some time before I had to start work), I thought I would just try to write about a local business we had recently patronized. It worked!

So what have we learned here? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, “Not much.” Like coffee, sometimes Do It Anyways works and sometimes it does not. And the next time it doesn’t work for me, now I have a spare column.

Side note after I typed this in: Regular readers may remember I mentioned this column yesterday, saying that I had not typed it in. So today I in fact had to type it in and not just hit Publish. Still, I thought it was too good a headline to waste. My only regret is that now I don’t have a spare post any more. Guess I saw that one coming.