Writer’s block is a bad word for what I have today, as if there is something simply obstructing the path that needs to be moved.  No.  This is not writer’s block.  This is writer’s pain, writer’s agony, writer’s knife in the gut, writer’s riptide, writer’s living grave.

The cursor blinks.  It looks like an erratic blink.  Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, never predictable.  I do believe it is teasing me.

The words don’t seem to want to come.  It’s not that I am not passionate.  Quite the contrary.  I am enraged, embittered, so full of piss and vinegar that I ought to be sleeping in a pickling barrel at night.  The passions have drained me and thinned my skin, clarifying me, leaving me wet and slippery with salty partiality.  I’m too impassioned to think clearly, I think.  I want to speak about politics and conspiracies and language and belief and religion, I want to speak of all of these things so badly that I cannot settle on one theme.  I write out one sentence, two, three, and erase them in irrational hatred of my own thought.  Nothing is good enough.  Nothing dances silkily on the page.  Everything lies there in a zombie sulk, griping and moaning it’s way across the screen, trying to communicate but saying only “urgh, argh, b~r~a~i~n~s…”

I want desperately to be able to say what I desire.  I hate myself for sitting on the computer for three hours straight and have nothing to show for it but a better knowledge of Don Siegelman’s plight, and yet no words to properly express my horror and confusion at the state of our Union.  Why, oh why, can I not seem to whip my mind to serve me? Why do I have to go day after day feeling like I could but yet I am not?

I want to make the words sing.  I want to enrapture and inspire.  I want to do what I love to do and be loved for doing it.

I want to.  I may.  Some people say I am.

I feel like I’m failing.

And they call this “writer’s block.”

Assholes.