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Dec 25 2009

Uninspired

Okay, so again I’ve gotten really bad about updating, but it’s not like anyone reads this so it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow’s Christmas, yay! (Sarcasm). A couple weeks ago marked the one year anniversary of my website, my web host kindly reminded me as that happens to be my billing period. It’s weird to think that this time last year I wrote something for this just about every other day. I feel kind of like I’ve run out of things to say, other than teachers are annoying, college applications suck, and women are confusing. Here’s something I wrote to that end.

Uninspired

He sat at his desk, trying to write. He stared alternately at the blank page in front of him, and the keyboard below his hands, which remained at rest. His hands were mocking him.
“Come on, you really can’t think of anything?” said his right hand.
“Yeah, what’s up with that?” said the left.
“Shut it, both of you, you’re not helping,” he replied.
“Why is this such a problem? You’ve had the most inspirational couple of months ever, and you can’t think of something to write about?” the blank page chimed in.
“I can’t just write what happened, I would need to change it, add stuff, take stuff out, make it unrecognizable to those not already familiar with the events that took place. I’ve been trying to do that, but I can’t, it always ends up being exactly what happened, and I can’t use that.”
“Then think of something else entirely,” his right hand said.
“Ever since this happened I haven’t been able to think of anything else. Every time I try to invent characters and plots all of the things that happened to me get into my head and I can’t think of anything else. It should be inspiration but it’s turned into writers’ block.”
“What about a Christmas story? Everyone loves Christmas stories,” his left hand suggested.
“All the best Christmas stories are about really dysfunctional families, and I don’t have one of those.”
“You’ve never had a girlfriend either, but that didn’t stop you writing all those other stories,” his left hand retorted.
“Fair enough. I dunno, I’m just not feeling it.”
“Well what are you feeling?” asked the blank page.
“Confused, annoyed, confused again, and now tired even though I didn’t get up until mid afternoon.”
“Well what abou –”
“How about all of you shut up so I can think straight, I’ll come up with something.”
“Fine, see if we care,” said his right hand.
He sat and looked at the blank page. He swiveled around in his chair and looked at the fish tank. It needed cleaning, he realized. He considered getting up and doing it right now as an excuse to not try and write, but that would just be delaying the inevitable. He swiveled back and sighed. He looked at the clock, in fifteen minutes it would be Christmas. He thought about what that meant to him. Honestly, he didn’t feel much. There wasn’t any of the excitement and anticipation that had kept him up on Christmas Eve when he was younger. Keeping him up instead was insomnia, and this damn blank page.

He hit the keyboard, just to see something on the page. The result was a jumble of letters which the computer underlined in red as soon as one of his hands made contact with the space bar. He struck out at the Backspace key and watched it all get erased. This wasn’t working. He had no ideas, he realized it had been a bad decision to sit down and try to force it, that wasn’t how he worked. He moved his hand from the keyboard to the mouse, and closed the word processor. The damn thing asked him if he wanted to save, despite the page being completely blank. He clicked yes, typed in “fuck this” and hit enter. He flipped the switch on his computer instead of shutting it down, and went to bed.