Writer’s block

“Write something!” She says, gaily, before blowing a kiss and heading out of the door. I make a face. She grins. Doesn’t that self-indulgent list of quirks, too long to put into tweets, that I wrote earlier – for the sake of something, anything, to write – count? Probably not.

I notice the tumble dryer is still going. The laundry. That will kill some time. I take the warm clothes out and start folding them. Badly. Marvelling at how warm in particular jeans get in the dryer. I am not thinking about writing. There’s a twist-tie mixed in with the clothes. I can’t imagine how it got in there but it doesn’t look like it did any damage. A few more precious seconds of not thinking about writing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as bad as homework used to be. I’m okay once I get going. But the getting going takes a bit of a push. I toss her sort-of folded clothes on to the pile at the end of the bed and cram mine into my chest of drawers. They don’t quite fit, so the bottom of the drawers pops out at the back, so you have to go through this ridiculous routine of trying to get it back in so the whole thing closes properly. As usual, I ham-fistedly force it all together so it holds. For now.

I walk past the bathroom and idly muse about the toilet paper. I just grabbed some off the shelf in the store and it’s not as good as the last stuff. It’s perfectly serviceable, just a bit institutional. Like the type you’d find in a petrol station or a bar. I mean, it’s not that weird baking sheet stuff we had all the way back in primary school or anything. I doubt they even allowed that in prisons. Kids don’t know any better, so we can make them put up with all sorts of little hardships. I worry that these type of thoughts are getting perilously close to the laziest kind of stand-up, ‘Hey! Remember Tizer? Didn’t it taste weird?’ [guffaw] I try in vain to think of something remotely profound.

The trouble with that is that a whole lot of people got there first. A whole lot. And the overwhelming majority of them cleverer, more successful and highly regarded than I could ever hope to be. Still, I can at least try. I sit down and stare at the screen. I will not start reading stuff on the internet. Fall down one of those holes and it could be hours before I pull myself out. Random, utterly-useless-in-everyday-life, trivia and facts are so appealing I struggle to tear myself away. The Armadillo is one of the few known creatures other than man that can contract leprosy. Don’t even think about surfing ‘for a bit’, I might never surface. I do some more staring. Some more thinking.

I put my hands on the keys. If I can just make it to 500 words.

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