I wrote down a quote in one of my notebooks. “The so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance.” I don’t know where I read it but apparently it’s from someone named William Stafford.

I feel very blocked today. The solution to this, of course, is to just start writing which would be fine if I were writing in a notebook. But this is a blog and the entries are published for other people to read. In all of my creative pursuits, in writing and in performing, one of my main objectives is to create something that isn’t a waste of the audience’s time. I think that’s a pretty good metric. So, I feel that my high standards, while prohibitive, should not be lowered.

I feel like I’ve done the “here’s an average mundane day” thing here before and I don’t want to do it again (though, I suppose I am right now). Instead, I’ll just give you a list of my internal brainstorm, all of the topics that are stones from which I could have tried to squeeze some blood today but said, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s enough there.”

1. My Doc Martens. I’ve been wearing Doc Martens since high school and I have a pair on today. They’re shiny black and they’re cracking a bit from use. I’m old enough that the things I wore in high school are coming back as a retro trend.
2. For the past two days, when I’ve gone to Pret a Manger for my afternoon coffee, they’ve said, “It’s on me.” This, along with catching an R train at Union Street just as it pulls into the station, makes me disproportionately happy. Apparently this has been a policy at Pret, like a customer appreciation thing. It works. I spend more money at Prets all around the city than I would care to track.
3. It shouldn’t be this warm in February. I should really research global warming.
4. I’ve been working with creative visualization in meditation lately and that is supposed to be helping me with this very problem. Imagine somewhere in my chest a creative spark that radiates light. Then watch it grow and expand in all directions. The only problem is, in my mind’s eye, it kind of looks like the radiating blast of an atomic bomb. I need to work on that.
5. I’m going to Blink Fitness before my improv show tonight. I’ve had jobs where I had to bring a computer to work and fear of leaving it in my locker where it might be stolen actually kept me from going to the gym. Now I don’t have to do that so I’m going to the gym more. I do have to bring my own towel, though, and that sucks.
6. The Innovators. This book traces the history of computers from the theoretical ideas set forth in the 1800s by Ada Lovelace up to the present. Along the way, it touches on Alan Turing, the Mark I, the ENIAC, ARPANET, and the invention of the microchip. I just got to Bill Gates. He seems like kind of an asshole but that’s how most tech geniuses are. Despite being a developer, I’ve never really loved or embraced tech like my peers but I think in order to understand something I need to know about it from conception to it’s current state, otherwise I can’t truly appreciate it. I’m starting to truly appreciate it. I feel like we’re in a weird place where something created by disruptive, revolutionary minds has now fallen into the hands of the establishment and I wonder if it will ever be taken back.