Whenever I sit down at the computer and see this blank screen, I begin to think I have to type something worthy on it.  The perfectionist peers over my shoulder and says, "no, don't write that, that's boring."  Most of the time, I agree.  My shoulders start to move closer and closer to my ears, I get a burning sensation in my back muscles, and my brain feels like a wad of wet cotton in my head.  Everything seems so difficult. 

 What if I wrote that the most satisfying thing that happened to me today was getting a call from my work's help desk to say they'd fixed my email?  I know it's not interesting, but it's all I've got.  Maybe if I had experienced today with a different mood floating around in my head, say one like a wispy summer cloud on a blue sky sunny day, I'd have a great insight or a funny story.  But I experienced today with a sludge mood in my head, and sludge moods don't usually give me anything much.  I'd be happy if a sludge mood would make like lava and slide out my brain through my ears and never come back. 

 I started writing this piece at 8:10pm.  I told myself that I would write for twenty minutes and then give myself permission to stop.  It is 8:29pm and I am getting ready to stop.  Aren't you glad?    

This morning I was on the back porch before sunrise.  The trees were black against the gray blue sky.  Something big landed in the branches and then another something big, followed by a third something big.  Three owls perched on the branches for a few moments before they flew away.  I love seeing owls.  My backyard is against a cow pasture and we hear them hooting all the time.  Sometimes we also hear little animals screaming in terror.  Let's face it, owls have to eat.  There must be plenty of mice and other juicy rodents out in that field for them to make a meal out of. 

We had a mouse living inside with us about six months ago.  He would mosey out every now and then and scare me.  I guess I scared him too.  Bandit, my dog, never saw him once.  I guess a dog isn't a cat, so I won't give him too hard a time about it.  Anyway, we decided that we should get rid of him, the mouse, not Bandit, so we bought a mouse trap at the hardware store.  I put a piece of cheese on it and we left it in the kitchen behind the refrigerator.  That mouse never reappeared.  He must have been highly intelligent.  Once, on a plantation tour, we learned that when a hostess wanted to politely get rid of her guests, she would put a pineapple on the end of their beds.  I guess we did the same kind of thing for that mouse, though not as graciously, and he got the message.

I've got to think that seeing three owls, just before dawn, is an auspicious sign.  When I see an owl, I think of wisdom and the number three is notoriously favorable, not to mention spiritual.  But I think the owls would have had to have been white.  I took an art class a few years ago and the Indian teacher explained to me that to see a white owl is good luck.  She also told me to never travel with bananas in my possession and to always step into an airplane, room, boat, bus, you get the idea, with my right foot first.  I do not travel with bananas, but I have never seen a white owl.  So I would say that I am, at best, only preventing bad luck from coming my way.  This is confirmed by the fact that it's evening now and I made it through an average day without harm.  Today may have been the day I was supposed to get run over by a garbage truck, or slip on a banana peel in aisle three, but neither happened.  I'll take that as luck enough.   

I guess one of the questions to ask myself about writing is why I want to write. Now that’s an interesting sentence right there. I typed, “why I want to write.” (I’ve added italics for emphasis so you can get where I’m going.) This implies that I desire to write, but that the desire is not yet actualized.

Maybe the better question to ask is what stops me from writing? That’s easy, I might not be good at it. I start out with these high expectations of almost effortlessly writing a NY Times bestseller that gets turned into a blockbuster movie.  Of coure, I get to pick the actor who will play my protagonist. This will take up a lot of my time, talking on the phone with the casting director while I’m sipping coffee at my Honolulu vacation home. There will be pressure for the next bestseller. I will be on the interminable journey of getting published again and again. The pressure is already mounting and it’s overwhelming. I can’t do it.

What if I were on a deserted island and I had a laptop with unlimited battery power? Well, wait, here is an excellent example of sloppy plot work. If I had a laptop, couldn’t I email for help? No, I guess not because I wouldn’t have an internet connection. As an aside, please don’t ask how I got the laptop, I just have it, okay? It’s my hypothetical, not yours. Okay, so, I’m on the deserted island with the magical laptop. Do I write? Yes, I write. Of course, any cretin would write. But not every cretin, before they found themselves on the island, would have experienced this longing, this primordial calling, to form into written words these illusive, at times well-behaved, most times incorrigible, experiences we call feelings. They would probably be perfectly happy to do suduko or watch American Idol.

I think I would experience a catharsis on the island. All those words and ideas that swirled around in my mind, and some that hung out in my subconscious, would stop by, finally glad to be invited to the party. “Why didn’t you visit before?” I’ll ask them. “Because you were always putting us off, saying that your house wasn’t tidy enough or you didn’t have time to make the perfect meal,” they’ll answer, holding their hands up while giving me a “we-didn’t-get-it-either” shoulder shrug. The act of simply showing up to my work will erode the creative block into a creative channel. I’ll still write some really awful stuff, but I’ll keep writing anyway because I’ll be comforted knowing that there is no chance in hell that anyone, besides me and maybe a monkey or two, and only if they are high up there in terms of evolutionary development, is ever going to read it. I could probably get hung up on what the monkeys will think of my work. But I will cheer myself up with the fact that they are monkeys, and no one would ever take a bad review from a monkey seriously, and I can always bribe them with bananas.

The question now is whether I realize that I don’t need to be stranded on the deserted island to write. I happen to be stranded right here, right where I am, in this life. I can have an open door policy for all my words and ideas and not bother to invite perfection. And, if I ever want to share what I write, that’s up to me. Otherwise, I will just let the monkeys read it.