Blockage
April 28, 2006
"You're having a little writer's block, eh?" said Katrina.
After a few crossed text messages, I gave her a call to to say hello. She was home eating stale cupcakes and nursing a freakishly bad reaction to mosquito bites. "I can't even wear a normal size shoe," she complained, before making the observation about my writing.
"Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I'm sick of exposing my stupid little life," I said. "There hasn't been much going on, anyway, and I feel like I'm just repeating myself. I can't decide whether to completely overhaul the blog or simply let it die a slow death. I can't even remember what motivated me to have it in the first place. Sometimes I think about giving myself little assignments. Like, say, buying a ticket to Las Vegas and covering a convention -- though I suppose that's been done already, hasn't it? Either way, I should try to branch out a little—try to write something more substantial. More worthwhile."
I wish I could have said, "I haven't been writing in my blog because I've been busy writing my next book," but I couldn't. I haven't been writing at all. Not even emails. I've been busy working, sure, but there's still been plenty of time to write -- if I wanted to. If I could.
My small desk faces the large windows of my loft, and I spend a lot of time looking outside. Deborah interrupts now and then to ask if I want coffee, or tea-- if I'm ready for breakfast, or to go outside and do whatever we have planned for the day. It breaks what little concentration I have, and I struggle not to get annoyed. I remind myself that only an asshole would get annoyed by such a thing and distractedly answer her, yes, or no, or in a minute.
If I say yes to tea, she puts the cup on my desk. I stand up, give her a hug and say, thanks. Once I'm standing, it's a few minutes before I sit down again. I pace, stretch, complain about my inability to write, then sit back down and stare out the window some more. My chair is uncomfortable. Essentially just a flat piece of plywood covered with 1/2 foam that neither rolls nor swivels. It's too low, and my shoulders hunch and my wrists cramp as I absentmindedly slide a finger back and forth on my laptop's trackpad.
Deborah's cat, Rory, jumps on my lap, and I shoo him off. He jumps on my desk, and I push him away. After several minutes of this, I relent. He curls his head under his paws to shield his eyes from the sunlight and passes out on my lap. If I type at all, I type over him. Deborah's other cat, Miss Velvet, the one Deborah keeps saying I should post pictures of and write a story about, gets jealous, and mews at my feet until her voice goes hoarse.
I fantasize for a moment about a soundproof basement.
At the suggestion, near insistence, of Miss Snark's recent post, I've started reading A Writer's Life by Gay Talese, a member of the old guard of New Journalism. It's a rather long book, and I've only just started it, so it's too soon to give a review -- not that it's my place to review it, anyway. Regardless, the book itself isn't why I bring him up, but rather what I read about his work habits in a New York Times article that coincided with his book's release.
"The hermit stage, on the other hand, begins every morning when, after visiting his wall length closet and selecting a pair of handmade shoes and one of his many handmade suits — calf-skin bulchers, say, to go with a black and white nailhead worsted — and then accessorizing with the appropriate tie, pocket square and cuff links, Mr. Talese goes out his front door and down 14 steps to a room under the stoop. This underground room, where he spends most of his day, is not a bunker, exactly. It's carpeted and nicely furnished. But there are no windows and no phone; the walls, lined with cartons of clippings and files, are more soundproof than Proust's. And what takes place down here frequently amounts to self-torture. "
In a book called The Courage to Write, I read that John Cheever did essentially the same thing, only with a slightly more eccentric twist. Every morning, he dressed in a suit, walked down to his basement, hung the suit on a hanger, and wrote in his underwear.
Dressing up like a dandy is a nice touch, and dressing to undress has a certain charm, but it's the windowless, soundproof basement rooms that intrigue me most.
Deborah and I live in an open loft with no walls other than the four that contain it. It's near impossible for either of us to work without being interrupted by the other. Something as simple as "Are you hungry?" easily knocks us off course. But it doesn't have to be one of us talking to the other directly. An overheard phone call, a conversation with a cat, or one of us talking to ourselves can sidetrack the other. I try not to sigh when I close my laptop's lid.
"Okay. Let's eat."
"Now that I'm working, you'll have more time to yourself," Deborah said sweetly, and with an unnecessary twinge of guilt. "You'll be able to write more."
Uh oh, I thought. Now what am I going to blame it on?
There's always the cats.
I often forget that it's possible to write without a computer. That you can sit outside in a park and scrawl words into a small notebook and they'll make just as much sense as the ones pecked onto a computer keyboard. I've tried it a few times, writing a nearly illegible scrawl into one of a dozen notebooks of various sizes that otherwise stay stacked in the back of my bottom desk drawer. One of them, a handmade leather-bound hardcover sketchbook from Italy that was given to me as a gift, remains blank and untouched because I've never been able to bring myself to dirty it up with words or pictures. Actually, that's not true. There is a rubbing of a rabbit on the first page. It was part of a logo on the front of a water heater in an Amsterdam apartment that I rented a few summers ago. I had big plans for that book. The other journals are half-filled at most. I get struck with the romantic urge to handwrite with a pen in a notebook, but the inspiration rarely lasts. I carry the book around for a few days, maybe a week, then decide it's too heavy and toss it into the drawer with the others.
Yesterday, instead of spending money on a journal that I knew I'd never use, I bought a small, 6 x 4-inch spiral-bound notebook with an ugly cardboard cover that looks like an aerial view of Mars, only green. "Stylish cover fits with any decor—office or home," it says on the back. Although it’s not true by any stretch, for a dollar and sixty-nine cents, it's not worth arguing over. This'll work, I said to myself. And if it doesn't, so what?
I bought it at Staples. Deborah had to get some envelopes for her bookkeeping day job, and I went with her.
"Excuse me," Deborah said to one of the many salespeople roaming the floor. "Where can I find envelopes?"
"Upstairs," the guys said, pointing toward the staircase. "In office supplies."
"Office supplies?" Deborah whispered as we started up the steps. "You've got to be fucking kidding me. We're in Staples. Isn't the whole store office supplies?"
Deborah bought her envelopes and went to work, leaving me on my own with nothing to do. I decided to take my little notebook and head to the Hudson River waterfront to soak in the beautiful summer weather and maybe do a little writing.
Near 15th Street, there's a small oval of grass roughly 60 feet across nestled between two arteries of thick traffic: the Westside Highway on one side, and 10th Avenue on the other. It struck me a little weird, and I debated about walking further to find a more scenic spot. But I was feeling too lazy, so I staked out an area in the strange little park, sat down, and pulled out my notebook. The blank pages reflected so brightly in the sun that it gave me a headache. After writing a word or two of nonsense, I put the book under my head and fell asleep.
