Of blank pages and other matters

Down the road from the hovel there is a coffee shop that I have been meaning to visit ever since I moved to the area. To see if the coffee lives up to the decor. Every time I tried it was either closed, wasn’t serving coffee, or was too crowded to get a foot in. I thought success was in sight as I walked in today only to be informed that they were due to close in 30 minutes or so. Its not ideal, but beggars can’t be you know whats and it poses an interesting challenge.

You see, I’ve been meaning to start writing regularly for some time; most of my life, give or take a few years. Every few months I decide that today would be the day when I actually do start and today is just such a day. After years of dreaming up what books, essays, articles, stories and blogs I would go on to write, I’ll settle for anorexic paragraphs. You, dear reader, may be familiar with the initial desire to write and blank pages that follow. White, crisp, untouched. What does one put on them? And where does one begin? I feel guilty for dumping tosh on them. They hold so much promise. It’s unbearable really.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. Presently, having checked the news – all is not well with Brexit, still – and replied to text from L--- - who’d like to dance together, I have just short of 20 minutes to either write the damn thing or leave it off until melancholy takes hold again.

Orwell proposes that a test of a true writer lies in the impossibility of living without writing. He describes the innate desire, nay, inevitable drive to put words on paper and give them shape. I could go on living without writing alright; as evidenced by a better part of few too many years. What I can’t seem to do is live without the thought of writing. It nags and begs to be looked at. Except, when I do go to look at it, there’s nothing there.

Google informs me that kids start forming long-term memories that survive into adulthood around the age of 7. It follows that I should have at least a few years’ worth of memories in the tank from which to draw some inspiration. Except I don’t of course, it all seems like a rather long day. Joan Didion writes elsewhere that writing is a tool that helps her understand her own thoughts. If only I started earlier, I would’ve been able to figure out what happened over the past twenty-odd years.

Before I get a chance to dive into that particular cesspool of roaches, I am brought back, gratefully, to the present by a screech of chairs and reminded that my 30 minutes are up. Singular staff member is rearranging coffee books at a nearby table with some veiled impatience. He seems far too polite to ask me to leave, but one can't escape the fact that I am rather getting in a way between him and freedom. One can’t be callous to that sort of thing, so I oblige.

This is it then, the thing I’ve been meaning to do for so long. To say that it hasn’t quite lived up to twenty years of expectations would be to overstate the matter to a Pulitzer-worthy standard. But I suppose few things ever could and one has to start somewhere.

Oh and in case you were wondering, coffee was good.