All Blocked Up

Someone asked me the other day why there had been no Indignant Citizen postings since April. I said, in my best Agent 86 voice, “Would you believe, a King Hell case of writer’s block?”

That’s a big part of it, the writer’s block. There is too much to write, and I often fear I can’t write any of it the way I want to, the way I see it written in my head. So I write nothing. Writer’s block, they say, can be tied to depression, to changes in the frontal lobe of the brain. Here’s what usually happens to me: During the day I get these great ideas for topics or plot lines. At work, I may jot them down or, if the inspiration has come from a magazine or newspaper article, I will put it in my bag, intending to take it out and write about it later. When I get home, I turn on the computer. Then I may make dinner, or watch a little TV to unwind. At some point I sit down at the computer and open a document. Almost immediately, sometimes before I type even a single word, I am overcome by fatigue. I stop. Then I begin surfing the Internet as a distraction, or I may return to watching TV.

Take right now, for example. Game 1 of the World Series is a blowout, with Boston killing Colorado 13-1. I have a load of laundry drying that doesn’t necessarily have to be folded before I go to bed. It’s 11:15 p.m. I am exhausted. I sat down to write about the transit funding clusterfuck in Springfield—an embarrassment on national and international levels—but all I can think about is how tired I am and how I have to get up and go to work in the morning.

And so what am I doing? Instead of writing about the transit funding fiasco, and how if the RTA entities are forced to carry out service cuts and fare hikes on the scale that has been discussed, someone will die—a kid forced to walk through gang territory because the bus he or she takes to school got cut, or a homeless person freezing to death waiting for a bus that never comes—and how as a result of that death or those deaths Gov. Blagojevich, House Speaker Madigan and Senate President Jones will have someone’s blood on their hands … instead of that I’m writing about writer’s block.

Writing about writer’s block may seem counterintuitive, but as it turns out it’s not that uncommon, they say. Hemingway did it. So did Freud and Kafka and Joseph Conrad. Look at Charlie Kaufman. He wrote a whole screenplay about writer’s block, a screenplay that was supposed to be an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief,” but that instead became the movie “Adaptation.”

I found “Adaptation” to be annoying. First of all, I enjoy Susan Orlean’s writing. I would have liked to have seen “The Orchid Thief” made into a movie that actually, you know, incorporated parts of the book. Second, how self-important does one have to be to turn a screenplay based on someone else’s book into a screenplay about oneself? And third … well, shit. What the hell? Who am I to write about what I didn’t like about “Adaptation?” I’ve just spent six paragraphs on my own writer’s block when what I intended to write about was transit.

And now it is 11:51 p.m. and I am totally awake, but can think of nothing but the fact that the alarm is going to go off in six hours.

Well maybe this is a start, at any rate.

The Indignant Citizen