I sit in front of my computer and stare at the little blinking line where my letters begin and end. I hate you, I say to it, as it mocks me yet again. When I’ve stopped typing long enough, it stops blinking, as if to say “I’ll wait…while you get your shit together.” It taunts me.
There are days when there are no words, and lately this have been most days. I have been working on editing my chapbook, but really no writing is being accomplished. I wish that I was the type of person who could write for several hours a day, pounding out thousands of words in a sitting, but that’s not me. I’m grateful for any progress. Three pages? Great. Three lines? Equally great, so long as they’re good lines. Lately, there have been no good lines. There has been me on a Monday trying to figure out what I want to say that week. There has been an hour of staring at my poetry document trying to eke some feeling out. There have been days of thinking about my novel followed by me staring at my old foe, the cursor. That blinking bastard.
Is this some new form of writer’s block for me, where I can see things in my head but can’t put them on the paper? What a nightmare scenario that is! Instead my ideas fester until I convince myself that they are not good enough for paper, and then I move onto the next idea, which often suffers the same fate. Still, he blinks, waiting as I think about how I just can’t get the words out.
Today is a three lines kind of day. I don’t have all that much to say. The boys are here and I would rather be spending time with them than sitting at my computer, staring at the cursor and cursing its existence. Perhaps that’s where the name comes from. It’s a curse.
Instead, I will go about the daily business of life. I will hang with the boys, pick up the house, take a shower, drive my sister to work, check on my mother, call a friend…all those things we do daily because they need to be done or because we want to do them. Then I will return home later to my computer, turn it on and wait…
…for the damn cursor to start blinking at me again.
Ham 'N Eggs 