Cracking Cement

A little ramble on writer's block

I look outside the window at the cattails, dandelions, fennel, and other weeds I cannot name that grow out of the cracked cement in my backyard. I wonder how they thrive solely on what little dirt is left to breathe the air. But that doesn't seem to bring me out of the brainless mode I’m in. I’m stuck. Maybe. Maybe I’m not. I do like to procrastinate. Not like the weeds. They’re living, sucking up the sun with each moment of the day. But still, looking out the window doesn't seem to bring anything onto the page. So I sit. 

A few weeks ago I was at a friend’s house before going to see Juan Wuaters. We were drinking wine and talking, playing with his new kittens. I wanted a cigarette and I knew they’d want to bum one off me. We went upstairs to go sit on the roof. We brought the wine. We brought blankets. The sun was about to set. Our friend, calling from just below the roof, told us we were stuck.

“I locked us out,” he laughed.

We walked downstairs, trying to find a way to unlock it. We picked it, shoved credit and insurance cards in the crack. We hit the door knob with a brick and a gardening hose, hoping to break the knob off instead of the whole door. None of it worked. We did break the door knob, but it never fell out of place. 

Eventually, we gave up on saving the door. One of us kicked it down. We thought it would be harder to break. It only took him three kicks, revealing the door to be two single plywood sheets between corrugated cardboard. A shitty door. We thought it would be harder than that. We were just fussing in the wrong sort of way.

I want that. A simple burst to let my brain back into all this writing stuff — this thinking clearly stuff which is the reason I love to write. I love to pretend I know what is going on in the world and my own head. But I can’t. Instead I just long to be the weeds, waiting for the touch of an american goldfinch to press against my stalk.

There’s no perfect definition of writer’s block, but it seems everyone’s said something about it so I might as well join the din. Writer’s block is this: we’re in a rut and eventually we have to get over it. But that’s only for some of us. Erykah Badu doesn’t believe in writer’s block. Not because she’s constantly writing like a violet aura of light shining down upon us, but because it’s just one interpretation. She calls the down periods of creativity, downloading periods. I like that. I’ve been in a downloading period. But I want out now.

However, I think I might actually have the opposite problem — I have way too many ideas. 

I want to write a manifesto on the power of the beaver. I want to edit the sixty or seventy stories I’ve written over the past two years. I want to write about dry farming in Sonoma Valley. I want to write about the coho salmon. I want to write about the mysterious mountain beaver of Point Reyes national seashore. I want to write about the confusion I have with loving Target. I want to write about the death of coffee. I want to edit that piece on JB Blunk. I want to tell people the world is terrifying, from every vantage point, but that it’s beautiful that all of this is at all. 

The ideas, they don’t sit like slots in a Pez dispenser like I want them to. My brain doesn’t work like that (I’d love to meet someone whose brain does work like that). Instead, they rest like mounds of litter, impossible to sift through. Or, maybe more accurately, the ideas live as small clouds, the outline of each idea blending with the next all at once so as to make it near impossible to discern what the fuck it is I’m looking at. Instead, I’m just looking at a bunch of clouds.

But maybe the simple solution is to not worry. To sit down and just write and ramble and find where it is my body wants me to go and write. The somatics of writing. I wonder if anyone’s written on that (of course they have). Maybe then, I’ll trick myself into making something, even if it’s about something so small, like cracks in the cement.