Tabula Rasa

Here I am staring at a blank page in Microsoft Word. I do this 4 days a week. Sometimes the words come flowing out of me to spill onto the page creating my typical incoherent babblings, and sometimes (like today) I just sit and look at a blank page. Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit.

Since I am at work, I can stare at this blank page for a minute or 2 and then do some work. I come back to the blank page for a moment or 2 hoping for some kind of inspiration, and then do a bit more work. Sometimes whilst converting a file or saving a rather large image or dataset I will come back to this blank slate and be mesmerized by its stark white lack of content.

Often times I start out a post and then wipe the slate clean because what I wrote sucks. I will get a few paragraphs/sentences/words in and decide that is not the direction I wanted to go in. My muse is a fickle one. She taunts me with almost good ideas, and “could be nice if” posts that in the end won’t work. She laughingly sends me topics that don’t have an interesting angle.

Then… every once and a while she gives me something that I can work with. The times that my muse actually delivers the goods are few and far between, but when they happen my fingers fly across the keyboard as fast as they can (which is not too fast since I only learned the HPC method of typing*). Those are the posts that I am usually most happy with. These are also the posts that rarely get comments.

Today is not one of those days, today is a day where I have started this post about 7 times and gotten no where. Currently, the post I am working on as I type this… this post is the one I will go with today because really this is meta-posting at its best. I am writing about how I write, or how I don’t write. Can I get a ruling from a judge here?

Go with “how I don’t write.” That sounds right to us…. Right? Write? Get it?

Oh, goodness, even my impartial ethereal judges are corny.

... I am writing about how I don't write.

So there you have it. Most of my posts are an uphill struggle through 4 feet of snow. They are written, not with wild abandon or inspired fancy. They are written with the plodding determination of a dromedary silk caravan just after a sandstorm. The words must escape the inaccessible prison of my convoluted mind before being painstakingly affixed to the digital files I use to create my posts. Much like the relentless pursuit of the Komodo dragon, the posts are my once bitten and slowly dying prey. Basically, like the large bacteria infected lizards, I wait out my posts until they flop over from sickness and exhaustion. My writing is the tortoise telling the crowd after the hare has lost, “Slow and steady wins the race, bitches. Who’s betting against me now!”

And then again, sometimes I am inspired.

To recap:
Had a wonderful lunch today with Wifey and Lord Pithy
It was wonderful due to its pizza buffetishness
Oh, and the company
Tomorrow is my birthday
I will be taking the day off
But I will still be posting
Bitches


*HPC = Hunt Peck and Curse