On Writer's Block (A Paradox)

All I hear are sirens of far off emergencies and the din under the overpass. Flowing water can erode the bedrock and shape the face of the earth, but its sound is so insignificant when faced with the combustion engine. Dogs bark in the distance and my sleep is disturbed. My fitful, restless sleep – the sleep of the wicked – where I string together ideas both grand and foolish, but have the substance of fireflies that flicker and vanish before my eyes in the dark.

I can’t keep a grasp on the characters I’ve created, in this case Steve and Louis. They sit before me as unfinished mounds of flat clay, grey and wet with the tears of the tragedies they are yet to face and yet to overcome. Without the spark of life, these two men are just ideas in my head and have no form, no body that can impact the lives of others. I can’t put them on paper, my attentions keep wandering.

I keep seeing different worlds and different stories, but only ever the beginnings, as if the stories never finish and I’m not allowed to know what happens. Worlds full of hunger and hurt and worlds full of joy and redemption, but none like the one I’m in.

The world I am in. I recently went camping (if it could be called camping) in the Wooster are of Ohio, a little place called Greer Landing. Tents went up, fires were lit and hotdogs were cooked, but all the while there was the skunk of mid-grade weed and the burn of Crown Royal down my throat, choking my appreciation of the trees that looked so alive, they came at me like a pop-up book. Nature was overcome by nurture and the rednecks who set up camp twenty yards away made this very clear by opening up the bed of their pick-up and revealing a 52-inch flat panel television. Talk about class.

I thought to myself, this is not camping, this is just America in a different scene. Others turn to me and say, “redneck fabulous” to describe the horror.

I try to escape, I go canoeing. It takes six hours of canoeing and twenty miles of river before I stop hearing motors and sirens. The sun goes down and my wet feet shrivel in my tennis shoes, small suffering to seek a still and a silence.

All it is, what it all really is, is my childish anger. Resentment towards a culture I was born into and had and have no choice in changing. People with big hands and big wallets affect the world around me and all I can do is put words on paper and hope they reach your eyes. That’s the small person in me talking.

The big person in me asks, “if you were dying, if you were granted a wish, what would it be?” My girlfriend answers, “I would spend my dying time helping animals, volunteering.” Flabbergasted and voiceless I imagine my answers. The pictures that come are of fire and desolation, worlds without voices and the eyes of the machine. Green and rolling but with smoke in the distance. These are wishes that cannot come true, at least not while I live to see them.

These are the wishes of the wicked as are my dreams. It keeps me from writing like it keeps me awake at night, wondering if the world I am in is the one that I see in my dreams. Wondering if these words will find a voice and if the stories I create can have a life of their own.