Laziness

I am a lazy guy and a lazy writer. Oh, I have my little bursts of energy, rather like my sedate cat, who once or twice a day races furiously around the floor for thirty seconds, then immediately forgets all about it. Neither Claire nor I have much stamina for the long haul. If I ever thought I would be a book-writer, I was disabused of that notion early on when I found even a medium-length film review challenging to complete.

One of the reasons I took a hiatus from PMD was that I was beginning to feel compelled to write something about each stimulus -- I've read this book, I've seen this film, I ought to write about it. The results of such forced labor are not bad, but I can immediately tell the difference between something I worked up and something that flowed out of me, even years later. The best writing I've done is always formed in my mind before I get it down; the actual physical writing is just a form of capture. I don't enjoy wrestling with the blank page, which is inescapably the lot of the professional writer I once was. I backpedaled to amateurism more with relief than disappointment.

So when PMD began to take on an ever so slight professional cast, I shut 'er down. A bargain I've made with myself on the occasion of this revival is to post only from the compulsion of the words needing to be put down, not the compulsion of some vague responsibility to memorialize my thoughts on "everything." Only 1/100 of what goes through my head, if that, ever makes it into written sentences, and I have to accept that that's OK.

I probably will put out quick hit, Twitter-ish posts giving some indication of what I could be writing about at greater length, and might someday, if and when one of those bursts of energy hits me.