beating a 15-storey Block with nothing but spit and automatism

Writing used to be a morning habit, a ritual before starting things that are regimented and are stamped with deadlines. Lately, writing for myself has been feeling like a chore, something that can be put off until it is forgotten in the daily grind. This happens, I guess. It’s a phase. It’s a phase though that I don’t want to eventually get used to, I want it to be a phase that I’ll always dislike the way people dislike constipation.

I used to write humor and sarcasm (or so I’d like to think) but finding humor these days seems tedious, forced. It’s fascinating how I used to find something funny in bus rides or in Chucks, how I can stop and think about things that interest me or annoy me. I don’t think the humor in little things escape me, I can see them perfectly well now as I did then, it’s just the writing that escapes me I think. That’s not a good image: words evacuating from my brain en masse, slipping through my fingers, landing at the tip of my tongue.

I remember somebody who asked me for tips to fight writer’s block once. I used to think The Block cannot be fought, I used to imagine it as a colossus as tall as a 15-storey building and with massive arms and a club for good measure. The best thing to do, I told this somebody, is to ignore The Block until it becomes bored with you and goes away. You try to skirt past it and you’d just be a pulpy mess afterward. You don’t want to be road kill before your first masterpiece.

I spoke to my friend Rem about The Block once, how terrified I am of it and how much I hate it for bringing a disconnect between the ideas in my head and the non-existent words on paper. My typical creative process goes a little like this: an idea plops into my head, into the lake of ideas in there, and if the idea is persistent enough, I write it down. With The Block in place I feel that the ideas dissipate into vapor and the lake dries up. Rem says that The Block is something people invent for themselves, made of blocks of responsibilities that do not define a person.

When I thought about it, I thought of Archimedes and water displacement. I have weird thought processes, I know, but let me explain. If the lake is there, and I place The Block colossus into the water, the idea droplets are displaced and overflows.

Did that make sense to you? Oh, and yeah. My way of beating the ogre with a club is to soak it in a lake and write about it. I beat The Block by writing about it. I’m never sure if it works.