This, Too, Shall Pass

     Maybe it's encroaching old age and diminished energy. Maybe it's outrage fatigue. I don't know what the problem is.

     The day I began blogging over 21 years ago, I recall having written five or six posts that first day. Four and a half years later during the last time Iran had seen this level of unrest, I was posting up to two dozen times a day.

     I'd always prided myself on being able to write 100,000-200,000 word novels while still maintaining this blog. Yeah, there many times when I had to push myself to write something. But there was always this stubborn sense of responsibility, obligation, if you will, to write about what's going on politically in this world, in this country. Yes, many times it's a grind but, until lately, the words still got written.

     But lately, I've been sitting on my patio looking out over Phoenix like an invalid. I spend hours and hours a day out here. Then, when the sun sinks into the west and I prepare to make dinner, I look at what I'd written and am amazed at how unproductive I've been. Some days, yes, I wear my pajama bottoms, keenly aware of how that feeds into the blogger stereotype. My new rescue cat, Midnight, zips around the house as if making a mockery of my lack of energy and motivation.

     Some would reflexively refer to what's afflicting me as "writer's block". I don't believe in that. I think it was Stephen King who'd dismissed writer's block as just a lack of interest or focus. But in my case, I don't think either applies. It's a curious and troubling form of paralysis with a dimly-realized provenance. 

     I may or may not have stated months or years ago about how difficult it was for me to get back my writer's identity. When Barbara began her final, awful decline in 2022-2023, I found I didn't have the time or energy to write and my writer's identity transformed into something else- Barbara's sole caretaker. Before and after she went in the hospital and, eventually, that nursing home, I tried, and failed, to complete no fewer than six novels. Even after she died in September 2023, I still couldn't put anything together. It was a loss of identity, an especially pernicious form of Imposter Syndrome, something virtually every writer goes through at some point. You're only as good as your last book, after all.

     I fought like hell to get that identity back. In the fewer than two years I've been in Phoenix, I've written two novels and, until lately, was proceeding rapidly with two others. My novella, The Final Bullet, was the first novel I'd published in nearly four and a half years, my first since Hollywoodland in December 2020. That's quite a drop-off for someone who was used to publishing 1-2 books a year.

     I'm in the home stretch of one but lately, I've gone from writing several thousand words a day to several hundred. I tell myself that I want to get the denouement right, that I don't want to have to engage in major carpentry when I start the revision process.

     But, deep down, I know better. And this paralysis has metastasized into my blogging.

     Now, anyone who knows anything at all about me knows that I never considered this dying form of citizen journalism anywhere nearly as important as my long fiction. Writing has been the sole constant in my life since my senior year of high school in 1977. Barb is long dead and no longer needs my care. And in this, the twilight of my life, this is the only identity I have left. It's the only thing that validates me as a human being, that gives my life purpose.

     Yet, as stated, there's another facet to my writing life. This damned blog writing about damned politicians. It's a stubborn sense of responsibility, undertaking this endeavor in the most thankless of mediums. And I've been prolific since coming to Phoenix. It's not as if the place inspires me. I can't wait to leave Arizona for good and get back to my beloved Massachusetts. Maybe it's a growing sense of my own mortality. It'd been said often that the older he got, the more prolific Isaac Asimov got. I think it was because he recognized the end was drawing near and that that little white light at the end of the tunnel was turning into a blinding spotlight.

     So maybe that's it.

     And lately, I've been afflicted with this crippling sense of paralysis, especially as regards the pages of this blog. In the nearly 18 years I've been running it, I've written well over 4500 posts. That's millions of words, easy. Sometimes I post daily for weeks on end. But now, I feel thick-tongued, incapable of weighing in on anything without sounding like an ignoramus. If I ever feel that way, my default setting is to not write anything, to put it off for another day and see if I'm in a better frame of mind.

     And it all started last Saturday when we bombed Iran again. I'm awestruck, and not in a good way, at the hideousness we've unleashed on the Iranian people. It's obvious to me that our so-called Commander in Chief is a blithering fucking idiot who never had any exit strategy in mind, never even questioned the ramifications of starting a proxy war for Israel's benefit. I'm horrified that we callously killed over 500 Iranians, including 85 schoolgirls.

     Yes, their Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was a brutal repressive dictator but we can't be the assassins much less the policemen of the world. He was their responsibility. And now we're about to unleash sectarian violence, if not civil war, in Iran and destabilizing the entire region. It was waged with simple-mindedness but the consequences are far more complex and I don't feel as if I'm up to the task. That's better done by people with far better minds than mine, people who have a better grasp of what's going on with the Middle East.

     But this sense of paralysis, hopefully, will prove to be just a blip on my intellectual and emotional radar. This, too, shall pass. Hopefully.