I have a confession to make. Well, confession might be too strong of a word. That would connote sinning, and I don’t believe I’ve sinned in this case. Maybe, an admission — yeah, that sounds better. I have an admission to make. Although on second thought, admission reminds me of college admissions, which reminds me of college admissions scandals (re: Aunt Becky). And I’m not about to bring on a scandal in this column — that just might cost me this job, and I have a dog named Blobby to support. So scratch that while I go on to thesaurus.com (as any professional would). Okay, okay, I got it. Proclamation. I have a proclamation to make. Now, doesn’t that sound regal? At last, we’ve settled on the perfect word, but before I proclaim what I’m about to proclaim, I must ask that you not judge me. Good? Okay, here goes nothing … if you can’t tell I’m stalling … because … because I have no idea what to write.
I know, I know, what you’re thinking. Wow, so novel that a writer is afflicted with writer’s block. Boohoo for you. But, yes, boohoo for me. This is supposed to be my thing — writing and all that jazz. Back in the day, I could pull a topic straight out of my ear like a magician pulling out a quarter. I mean, do you see what I’m talking about? I don’t even think that metaphor works, and I sat here at this computer for a full three minutes trying to come up with it. In my youth, which wasn’t that long ago, I could write about anything. Once, I wrote a beautiful essay detailing the strengths and weaknesses of Julius Caesar’s leadership style — with each strength and weakness being compared to a different component of a Caesar salad. Anchovies were a weakness; croutons were a strength; lettuce was Caesar meeting the bare minimum for something or the other — I can’t remember, but I remember I got an A (and a note to maybe not compare Julius Caesar to a Caesar salad on my AP Latin exam).
I just know my younger self would be so disappointed in me. My therapist would call it a symptom of my anxiety — this need to be perfect. But look at all this space I have to fill with my words and thoughts. You’d think at this point that surely — surely — I would have thought of something. Anything. So much is going on with the world. So much. Something’s going on with the debt ceiling, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly. Then there was the season — or is it series — finale of Succession that happened recently, but I’m only on the second season, so I can’t talk about that. Of course, there’s the fact that Tennessee’s “anti-drag” law has been declared unconstitutional! (Yay!) But our reporter Kailynn Johnson has been doing a great job covering it (see p. 4), and I’m not about to compete (see my failed magician metaphor above).
Ummmm, I suppose I could talk about how Covid has been declared over but not really or about how the U.S. Surgeon General has declared a decline in mental health of kids as an urgent public health crisis or about how gun violence seems to be a permanent mainstay on news headlines or about how it’s been almost a year since Roe v. Wade was overturned or about how the WGA strike is still going on or about how Taylor Swift was dating a sleazebag of a man until like yesterday or about how social media is rotting our brains or about how carbon dioxide is growing at a near-record rate which is very much a bad thing or about how Ring cameras have been used to spy on customers which is also bad or about how capitalism sucks and politicians suck and sleazebag men suck, and this is where we end up with a run-on sentence and what we call a negative thought spiral that my therapist would not approve of (though she might approve of the run-on since that breaks the perfectionist tendencies in me, yay me).
I guess I could mine something from my personal life, but not much is going on there — even though everything seems to be going on all the time everywhere. It’s both overwhelming and underwhelming. All I want to do is crawl under the covers and listen to my dog snore, morning, noon, and night.
So I guess I do have something to confess: I have no idea what to write, and the sin of it all is that, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve brought you down with my sinking ship of despair. But I’m not sorry. As I said before, I have to fill this space, so I can keep my job to support my dog, who sleeps by my side as I write this, snoring and wagging his tail as he dreams about who knows what, as if everything is not happening everywhere all the time.
