Always something else to do

There really is always something else I could, maybe even should, be doing besides blogging. Including, probably, "writing" -- which is really just to say working on one of the several pieces of fiction or poetry I've already sunk real time into and which will need much more to bring to "completion."

It is a guilty pleasure every single time I choose to do this instead. Because of the other things I could/should be doing. Because of the predictability with which it will draw my daughters, like magnets, to my desk side to whine about their boredom or something heinous the other has done. Because Skip approves of my "writing," but not my blogging. Because blogging has the particular drawback of acting like a fish hook caught in my sternum, with which my ego reels me back to the computer long after I've posted, over and over, all day long, to see if there's been a reader yet, or a comment, etc. There hasn't, so I console myself with one of those "quick"-become-an-hour visits to Facebook or other blogs I admire. The day slips away in pixels rather than in moments spent with my daughters, or admiring the summer tree canopy, or cleaned bathroom floors, or reading (or writing) a book, or any number of things I strongly suspect have greater value for humanity (including and most especially my own humanity).

But all of that said... I haven't written a thing all summer, except here. If it weren't for this blog, I do not believe I would have, either. This is -- and has been before -- the practice ground for the baby steps between blank page/dry well and tackling a writing project that "matters." Are you offended yet, rare and dear reader? Truly, I apologize, for my brutal dismissal of these words you are so kindly still here reading. This is a profoundly unpleasant post to put out into the world, and perhaps I shouldn't -- but that's the beauty/thing about blogging: here, I am writing. Writing. Maybe nothing that anyone else should read. But gah -- are you as bored by this repetitive theme as I am? -- I gotta do it somewhere. I do. Or, like that metaphorical dairy cow, I will explode. Eventually. And telling myself that I can't -- that I have nothing to say worth saying, no story to tell, no words to tell it -- is a lie. But I am unable to begin even to erode my stubborn insistence on that belief until I start to write. Anything. Even if it's just the same thing over and over again:

Here I practice. Here I tell myself I am a writer. Am I writer? I don't know. But I'm practicing. I'm practicing. I'm practicing. I'm practicing.

And trying to trust that will eventually yield something other than new iterations of the same sentence over and over again.