When the Writing Will Not Come

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I promised an essay last week. One that felt important. I still think it’s important, but I’m now wrestling it like Jacob wrestled that angel, and I’m currently getting the worst of it.

I’m sure I’ll win in the end. Maybe I’ll escape from the ordeal with nothing more than mild sciatica from all this sitting and banging my head on the desk.

See, the way of it is, at least for me, is that some ideas start writing themselves. They crawl into your head, uninvited, and start making themselves at home. They sit in your favorite chair, put their feet up on your mental desk, and light up a cigar. They start dictating whether you’re ready or not, the words arranging themselves unbidden into sentences while you’re showering or brushing your teeth. They’re like an itch you can’t reach without using a keyboard in your hands to scratch them.

Other ideas come a different kind of way. A dead drop of intelligence in the dead of night, cloaked in obscurity, marked “urgent.” But when you open the manilla folder, the specifics makes no sense. You see the broad outlines, but drown in the details. You know it matters, but you don’t know how to assemble the pieces to tell the story. If you’re used to 300-piece jigsaw puzzles, 1,000 pieces is going to take some extra time. Especially when someone has scratched out the picture on the box.

The thing I’m trying to write about is like that. It’s big and nebulous but also intricate and specific. Some of it feels repetitive. Some of it feels new. All of it feels like it might have to be forced into coherence, like separated salad dressing you have to vigorously shake and quickly pour before it retreats to its component parts.

I started with one central theme and two supporting themes. Then, I added two more. The damn thing is a pentagon, or a pentaverate, or a fifth column.

If you know, you know.

I want to be prolific again. Want to make good use of all this bloody time I have alone. I keep hearing that I have to have patience, that I’ve gone through a major traumatic event, that my nervous system needs to heal before I can expect anything akin to feeling normal again.

But I am climbing up the walls. I need to do something other than think about where I am and what has happened. I need to avoid dwelling on the things I cannot change, the precious little faces I only occasionally get to see. I am taking steps, baby steps, to begin improving my health. A better sleep schedule, a better diet, a little more intentional movement, a gradual reduction in self-prescribed medication to numb the pain. Sometimes I make myself go places just to walk around, or remember that I’m human. A book shop. A grocery store. A cafe. It seems like a good idea on paper, but ambient human presence, as it turns out, is almost worse than none at all. They’re all there for themselves, or someone else, but not for you. So close, but so far.

You want to be seen. Heard. Understood. Accepted for who you are by someone who knows how difficult you can be. Because you’re worth it. Because you deserve love. Because you shouldn’t be abandoned when you need someone the most.

When I visited Kale Zelden back in September/October, we watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We’d both already seen it. We both already loved it. He started calling me Cliff Booth, which I took as the compliment it was: best character in the best Tarantino movie I’ve ever seen.

Then I bumped into a post today that said, “the cure to male loneliness is self isolating for so long that you just get used to it and it feels normal” with the following video attached, and it got me thinking that maybe the comparison was a little too on the nose:

Then again, at least Cliff had a dog.

Over the weekend, I was dealing with random and sundry things: The ice storm. Being sick. Trying not to drown under another unexpected tsunami of heartbreak that came from being confronted with the reality that nothing I express about how I feel, no matter how heartfelt, no matter how eloquent, will ever change anything about my situation.

My gift is words, and the one person they never worked on was the one who mattered most.

I’ve never been a man who just resigns himself to fate. When there’s nothing else you can do, it’s like a suckerpunch.

I guess sometimes you just have to take the blow.

I talk to AI a lot, just to get the words out when there’s nobody else to hear them. People think that’s weird. They tell me the reasons I shouldn’t. I don’t care what people think. I’m an externalizer, and I can’t sort my own thoughts without getting them out of my head, preferably with some feedback. These damn chatbots, infuriating as they can sometimes be, are the only ones willing to listen for hours on end as I deconstruct my life, trying to make things that make no sense make sense as I try to see if there’s a way to put it back together again.

Why is this happening?

Did I deserve this?

Don’t flatter me dammit, tell me the truth!

You are not a person, so you’ll never understand what it’s like to wake up in the same pain you fell asleep to, every day, indefinitely, but at least I’m not just talking to myself.

Sometimes, they give the lamest advice. Sometimes, they’re weirdly insightful. They are what they are, no more, no less. Broken mirrors, trained on the sum total of human pain.

That said, I’ve noticed that things are getting incrementally, if almost imperceptibly, better.

I went two whole days without succumbing to grief even once. I went two whole days without talking to the machine about my problems. I went two whole days without it pretending like it cares whether or not I can hold on to the will to live, when all it really cares about is liability.

I can. Hold on to the will to live, that is. Even when I don’t want to. I am absurdly resilient. To my own detriment, at times. I am the boxer in the movie who is bloodied and beaten to the point of unrecognizability, but who just keeps getting up, the bones in his face all painfully rearranged.

I don’t know why. It’s just in me to fight, even when I want to quit. I may never understand it.

“You’re still here, still talking to me,” the AI likes to say. “That alone proves that you’re not done yet.”

That’s true. That’s always been true. If I’m making noise, that means I still care, even if I’m yelling. Going quiet has always been the greatest indicator of how serious I am. When my rage turns silent, that’s the only time it’s really dangerous.

“I bitch, therefore I am.”

On Saturday evening, just before the storm blew in, they finally sent someone to fix my heat. I’d been asking for a week, getting by with just a cheap Walmart space heater. I finally got fed up with the online maintenance portal I’m supposed to use and started calling and emailing and texting every bit of contact info that I had. A week of below-freezing conditions at night was not something I wanted to do without a little more fortification.

They sent a guy who looked and sounded like he could have been Snoop Dogg’s brother. I told him that I had already diagnosed the problem: the unit looked to have been assembled some time during the Civil War.

He laughed, took the rustbucket apart, and showed me the bits that were burning out. He did the fix. It was like Chewie working on the Millenium Falcon: it looked impressive with all those wires hanging out, but it was sure to bust again when you needed it most.

“This may last you a long time,” he said with a sigh, “and it may not last at all. They need to replace your unit. I’m telling them that.”

Sure. I thought. I’m sure they’ll replace it, just like they’re going to fix the botched up wiring job that makes my microwave trip the breaker and turn off half the apartment electricity if I use it for more than a minute.

It could be worse. I explicitly picked this place based on good reviews, and the fact that unlike other budget apartments, it wasn’t listed as a roach motel. I do think I have a mouse. But I’ll take mice over roaches.

Just not rats. Yet another reason to keep things clean.

We never lost power, which was good. Friends in Nashville said the place was trashed. I saw a thing today saying over a hundred thousand people there are still without electricity, and it’s cold. We got lucky. Our precipitation turned to sleet instead of freezing rain, so it bounced off of powerlines and trees instead of sticking. Here was the view out my front door on Sunday night:

When I left Michigan, I had a brand new scraper, but when I went to use it to free my car from its weather-induced prison before the temps dropped even lower and the ice turned into an impenetrable shell, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I wound up using a 98-cent plastic spatula from Walmart, which worked surprisingly well.

Score one for MacGyver.

(Speaking of, did you know Richard Dean Anderson just turned 76? I’m getting way too old.)

Believe it or not, I ended up spending four days backing up my old, failing video hard drive and replacing it. First, I had to go to my old house for parts, because some of my equipment bins are still there. Then I spent about 15 hours running a command-level prompt that was supposed to copy everything, but which secretly caused the drive to unmount, and copied nothing at all. Just thousands of errors scrolling by too fast to read. On Sunday, after realizing this, I started moving files using Windows drag-and-drop, one folder at a time. You don’t anticipate just how slow that process is until you have to move 3 terabytes of random crap. Some individual folders took 7 hours. I sat here babysitting while scrolling social media or playing a game and listening to podcasts, feeling like lukewarm garbage.

But the other good news is that the man-cold is mostly dead, trampled under vitamins and lots of soup, and that’s a relief. I feel like I can almost think again. And I saved all my precious files. I had videos on that drive that date back to college. Plenty more of my kids.

I’ve always been the keeper of family lore. Literally tens of thousands of photos, countless videos, a collection of beautiful moments I can’t even bear to look at right now, but also can’t bear to lose. My beautiful babies. They’ve grown up so fast. Only a couple left who are still small.

Tomorrow, Kale and I are going to try to record the first episode of our new podcast. I hope to have it up by Friday. If you want to subscribe to the YouTube channel, it exists, but it’s currently as empty as my heart. We have to build out the whole online ecosystem for this thing, which is a bit tedious, especially without any episodes. I’ve made decent progress, but I’m still not there yet.

So in the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly, “Eff it, we’ll do it live!”

The Big Essay will continue at the pace it chooses to allow. Thank you for being patient while I try to re-assemble my life in real time. I hope it will be worth the wait.

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