Filling the Half-Empty Page

“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep.”

— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

Don’t read too much into the title of this blog; my worldview is generally optimistic. Lately, though, writing has become for me like trying to squeeze frozen toothpaste through a pinhole. It’s exhausting, and I seem to be tired all the time. When they come at all, the spurts of creative energy arrive at awkward and inconvenient moments—at midnight when I have to work the next day, on the el when I can’t reach my notebook or steady myself to write, in the car on the way to the Jewel to scratch my weekly sourdough bread itch.

I have always been a writer, but never a disciplined one. I kept a journal as a kid and I would go through phases during which I would write every day, and then not touch pen to page for months. Being a journalist for the better part of the past 15 years has forced me to write something every day and provided me with a convenient excuse not to write in my free time. “I’ve been writing all day, I’m tired,” I would tell myself as I turned on the electronic doping agent known as the TV.

I’m still tired, but as I approach 37 years of age (in five days) I feel a renewed sense of urgency to respect the craft I fell in love with as a child and to incessantly prick the creative/artistic side of myself until I start bleeding out something worthwhile.

Recently I started taking group guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. There is something about the art of making music—good music—that is immediate and gratifying in a way that writing is not. I can’t make good music yet, but being around people who can is such a creative rush. I think it has flipped the artistic switch inside me and that the writing light is starting to flicker on again. One thing that practicing guitar has forced me to do is turn off the TV in the evenings. I feel like I have been freed from the luminescent sedation of the boob tube. I have moved my writing table to a place from which I cannot see or hear the TV. It’s wonderful.

I also feel like I have something to prove, to my insanely talented and extremely patient guitar teacher, to the rest of the class … to myself. I believe I am an artist, in the same way that the musicians I know are artists, but I have nothing to show to prove it. When my guitar teacher asks me, “What do you write?” I have no good answer. But that’s gonna change. Starting now.

I want to use this space as a forum for experimentation, practice and exchanging ideas, thoughts and frustrations. Sporadically since 2005 I have maintained an alter-ego blog, The Indignant Citizen. It’s not right place to write about writing, though. The IC is more about politics, planning and griping about the waves of stupidity we find ourselves paddling through every day. For a variety of reasons I haven’t had a lot left for indignation of late. There have been more pressing matters into which I’ve plowed the limited energy I’ve been able to save up.

Now’s the time, though, to start filling the half-empty pages.

CEC