Every time I sit down to write in this blog, I am whelmed with the emotions that accompany resistance (a la Pressfield's "The War of Art"). Firstly, I am reminded that I am about to spend time writing in a personal blog, and blogs are generally accepted as a vast sea of ignorance and posturing to gain attention with a few shining stars of originality. I am obliged to surmount this obstacle instead of going around it, being a picky fellow and rather obsessive with protocol. If I'm going to accomplish anything with this blog, it must stand out from the others, and the reason the others are so obsequious is that they cut corners. They skirt around the stark fact that no one cares what they have to say, and say it anyway. But I am able to quell this red flag by remembering that this blog shouldn't be a channel of conformity, but a pure expression of my musings. It's easy to regurgitate information; it takes effort and intelligence to process the hell out of it, keep the good bits, and create something that is simultaneously unique and expressive. So my intention with this blog, as with all creative endeavors, is to turn it into an ATV with the purpose to not only break free of the superhighway of public outlook, but actually to work toward getting somewhere new. This in turn reminds me that in the voyage, I must ultimately be accountable to myself, and not to the established road system.
Secondly, I must acknowledge (quite paradoxically to "The War of Art" and the first paragraph) that there are people who, if I were to pump out boatloads of sensationalized, mass-opinion, group-think crap, would read it and love it, because they love me and somehow find me interesting. This step is vital for me to fight any notion of self-pity that lessens the value of the relationships I have with my people and shrug off "doing my work". Although I am internally accountable, relationships with people are central to my humanity. Being accountable to those connections isn't even necessarily contradictory to original thought; a healthy relationship should desire an ocean of creative freedom, as it benefits the writer to write and the mother to nurture.
These two aspects are where I see resistance most frequently, but today there is another beast that materialized the second I sat down to write. I had nothing I wanted to say. If I've learned anything about the writing process, it's that writer's block is best solved by putting words on the screen. This allows the thought that we're trying to reach to come out like a diamond in a stool. It also leads to a mass of writing about writer's block, but a turd is easier to polish when there's a gemstone at the center.
That said, I don't have anything to write about, but this post is for my benefit anyhow, right?
