Return of the native

Well, it's back to the blog again. As anyone who has been following this blog (read: no one) is aware, I have not posted anything here in months. You see, I've been busy. In addition to not posting in this blog, I've also been busy not writing my first column for the new Portland monthly Tribe, not writing a series of restaurant reviews for same, and most depressingly, not finishing the July issue of Lime Tea, my online magazine. Most of the non-work I've been not doing for Lime Tea consists of not editing together the magazine's first little audio documentary, which is the first step of what has so far been a spectacularly unsuccessful effort to turn the magazine from a typical text-only publication into an exciting multimedia destination, comparable to a very sad and hollow This American Life. In fact, my efforts (or rather, non-efforts) to turn Lime Tea from a text-only publication into the aforementioned multimedia destination have resulted instead in transforming it from a qualified success into something that, to the unaided eye, is beginning to look more and more like a miserable failure.

Of course, I hope that this sad state of affairs is not permanent. It's really quite depressing, though. I simply can't seem to make myself finish anything. I don't know if I belive in writer's block, but if it exists, this is clearly how it manifests itself in my case. I have fallen prey to a complete and total inability to make myself do anything at all except sleep and (grudgingly) go to my embarrassingly menial job. I look at the work (assuming I can even make myself sit down and begin to contemplate it-- I can't always even get that far), shudder, and start checking the baseball standings, reading the newspaper, clearing off my desk, or anything else except get started on the task at hand. I've always been a procrastinator, but lately my fear of doing anything has become so pathological that I wonder if perhaps I shouldn't check myself into a psychiatric hospital. My entire life seems to be slipping through my fingers, and I can't even make myself do anything about it.

It's not that I'm not motivated. I know all too well that this year or so is my last chance to ever make anything of myself or my life. I just need to start, to put down one word, and then the next, and so on and so forth, until eventually I've accomplished something. I know that I am theoretically capable of this; I've written things before, edited things before, accomplished things before. But this time is different, somehow. Maybe it's the nagging feeling that I'm past my prime. Maybe I'm afraid that when I finally do finish, whatever I create is going to be crap, and then I'll have to face the fact that I have no remaining talent and my life is functionally over. I haven't written anything that was any good in a long time. Maybe I just don't have it anymore. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I don't. So why bother?

That is, in a roundabout way, the reason I started this blog in the first place, as a place to just practice the act of writing and/or working without the pressure to see to it that what I write is any good. Certainly, I've succeeded in this goal with the present post-- short of crying out plaintively for some deus ex machina to descend from the heavens and restore my lost gifts, I've accomplished nothing here. And there is no such thing as a deus ex machina for washed-up writers; if you've got no talent, you've got no talent, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. I could drone on like this for hours, and would do nothing to mask the fact that I have not had an original or worthwhile idea in months, if not years. Hard work is no substutute for inspiration, and even if it were, that would hardly pertain to the present case-- my lack of ideas pales in comparison to my disdain for honest toil. I have seldom felt so utterly devoid of anything to say, or as ill-equipped to say it in an interesting fashion if I did. Even if you were reading this at the biginning, I'm sure you've stopped by now, and who can blame you? Not me.