An occasional writer's journal

I was literally kicking my heels, cursing myself because I couldn’t find a thing to blog about. And it’s easy to dismiss such inertia as “writer’s block” when the problem is always much deeper.

Needless to say, I hadn’t discovered Twitter on that forgettable day, whenever it was. I didn’t have a clue that half the world was tweeting opinions about what the other half was thinking or doing, and I was still living in the wrong half! Nobody could be lost for words after an hour spent reading the real-time measure of another person’s life, or fail to be inspired by a passing quotation which, although retweeted and misquoted almost into obscurity, somehow drops into your Twitter feed at the right moment.

That brings me nicely back to my point, of how I recovered the willpower to take up the reins of  my neglected blog. It’s difficult to explain, but I distracted myself with a couple of movies and took inspiration from the following monologue from The Ice Storm.

Directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by James Schamus, the movie contained a moment that sort of summed up the way I’d been feeling that day, and many days hence. I’ve also posted a live clip of David Bowie’s haunting track I Can’t Read, a version of which is heard over the film’s closing credits and also gives me a sense of picking myself back up again.

“When you think about it, it’s not easy to just keep from wandering out of life. It’s like someone’s always leaving the door open to the next world… and if you weren’t paying attention, you could just walk through it. . . and then you’ve died. That’s why in your dreams it’s like you’re standing in that doorway and the dying people and the newborn people pass you by and brush up against you as they come in and out of the world during the night. You get spun around and in the morning it takes a while to find your way back into the world.”