I am currently in the throws of writer’s block.
Which is ironic, because prior to this diary, I hadn’t written anything especially weighty in, oh, three or four years.
Sometimes I think I should be working in a delicious 300-year-old English cottage somewhere, with lichens growing on the slate roof. Even though most English cottages have those thatch roofs, though I’m certain that they would tend to get musty or possibly moldy and that makes my throat itchy. I yearn to be a independently wealthy writer, capable of taking weeks off as the muse dictates. I think it would have been easier if I had been a writer in, for instance, Jane Austen’s time’. Or maybe Mary Shelley. They had things like absinthe and opium and they were LEGAL. I think. Maybe not. But then I think about niceties like penicillin and my asthma inhaler and the little cake of chemicals that I drop into the toilet tank so that I don’t have to scrub out the tank. So maybe I’ll just live in the now and wear a lot of empire waist dresses.
This writer’s block is not so much block as angst, even though I detest that term. Everyone is so angsty, there should be a store at the mall devoted to it, like the Gap, filled with many drab outfits and smelling of eucalyptus. Douglas Coupland has decided that he regrets ever coining the phrase ‘Generation X’. One of the little 19-year-olds that I trained actually told me that they were ‘Generation X’. I am 30 years old and I barely old enough to qualify for that generation. Stop calling it Generation X and start calling them the Depressed, because that’s really what they are.