Here is a drawing of a stapler:

I have tried for three days to write this blog post.

Here are the things I ‘ve wanted to write about: cooking with Allison, Lion King sleepover, waffles, miniature ponies, loganberry wine, aggressively loving strangers’ puppies, the decaying pumpkin patch, Mo’s front porch, and the times everything feels easy like childhood only effortless. But every time I sit down to examine these thoughts it’s like my zoom function is broken.

Sometimes I’m too far away, struggling to describe an Overwhelming Hugeness. Everything feels looming and vaguely out of focus. I just want to describe these events that have occurred in my adult life. I want to describe them concisely, humorously, and a bit poignantly. Seriously, like one pinch of poignance to lend the whole human experience a sense of depth. But those starts and stops read like a Dane Cook stand up routine, which is to say nonsensically with a lot of implied yelling.

Or I’m delving too deep into each minute detail. There’s no big picture or overarching theme. Just a menagerie of images parading together in paragraph form. For example, this morning’s attempt:

“Late afternoon pours through the skylight, puddles on the wood floors. It sticks to my feet in stringy swathes of gold. Allison juliennes vegetables, hacking matchsticks from the whole. Carrot, pepper, cucumber. She presses fat bulbs of garlic into the mixing bowl because my hands get so sticky wrenching the cloves from their papery binding. I hate when my hands are sticky. But at the stovetop I could be a machine or maybe a god. I could grow extra arms; I have no limits. I am creating a feast, prepared with precision and impeccable skill: crisped Andouille sausage rounds, Monterey jack hewn into soft, white cubes. Translucent skeins of sticky rice noodles. Tangerines’ overripe pulp tears away from the fragrant rinds. Citrus smell stains our fingertips…”

And so on, and so forth. Though I do spend plenty of my waking moments thinking about food, I don’t find food writing particularly compelling. You guys, this is not a food blog.

Which warrants the question: what the hell is it then? I consulted the Oracle, who told me two things.

• "Is kitten a thing you say now?  Is kitten a thing all Portlandians call each other?  Like you guys are all a bunch of baby cats, romping around in a make-shift play pen in the living room of America?  Strike that.  Portland is more like America's garage.  Get it? Cuz grunge and also grey.  I know Nirvana/grunge is a Seattle thing, but Portland took Seattle's dirty angst and made it dirtier and angstier so the metaphor holds.”(Note: ‘kitten’ is a term of endearment used by ULOL… I merely appropriated it.

And also:

• “I say write something different.  It won't be shitty because people will be able to read it and it will provoke thought.  It is also likely to be grammatically correct.  I feel like a thing missing from your blog is a thing you care a lot about.  Or really hate.  What matters to you? ...you started writing because YOU wanted to be a writer.”

So I write. I write to process the world around me; to explain my thoughts/feelings/etc, to myself as much as the people outside of me. What I write might be 80% autobiography, 10% journal entry, 8% grocery list, and 2% gratuitous pug pictures…  But it’s always as honest as I know how to be.

And honestly, I have tried for three days to write this post. I wanted to write about re-lived childhood experiences and the ways we expand into adulthood. The harder I pushed that concept, the harder it became to view those experiences clearly; to frame them coherently. In some respects, writer’s block acts like insomnia. The fear of being unable to write hinders my ability to write, which makes me more fearful about writing. The whole negative impact cycle builds on itself to become this crippling self-doubt monstrosity. This is my effort to break that cycle.

Today all I can write about is not writing.

All my love, you dirtiest/angstiest kittens.

-b