Lost: My Muse - $20 Reward

I think my imagination is dead, and I think I know exactly who the murderer is. You see, the “golden days” of my blog, when ideas for fun posts were coming every other minute, coincided perfectly with the period of time in which I was not in school and unemployed, and therefore in possession of no small amount of free time to just sit and brainstorm. Now, my full-time job gives me little time to think about anything but frozen TV dinners and paperwork associated therewith, and what free time I do have I want to spend on video games or TV, not on anything associated with thinking. It just proves what I’ve always believed: once you join the corporate world, the artistic side of your brain just shrivels up and dies. Yes, I have more than a little streak of bohemian in me (viva la vie boheme!) but its true that by the time I’m finished with work I barely have enough creative juice to get me through rehearsals for the two plays I’m in, so forget about a clever idea for the blog.

Which reminds me of these fitting lines, written by the poet:

Ah Muse, thou life in life!
Who in my youth did onetime grace
Me in the labored strains of strife,
Did bless my eyes, and touch my face,
Now with the stinging of a knife
Emptiness doth claim thy place!

Now you are probably thinking that by “the poet,” I mean Shakespeare or somebody, but in this case I am, of course, referring to myself (but thanks for mistaking my humble verse for that of Shakespeare!). As you can surely tell, I wrote these lines during the height of my romantic/transcendental phase when my greatest ambition was to be John Keats. Another frighteningly transcendental poem from the same period was called “Upon First Reading Emerson and Thoreau, 3^rd October 2003” which is an interesting read, if you are interested in literary periods and that sort of thing. I’ll assume that most of you aren’t and have no idea what I’m talking about and will move on politely. (But you English majors know where I’m coming from.)

The point is, I was actually writing back then. I was creating! Ideas came intermittently and painfully, but at least they came. I was thinking about all that this morning as I got up to go to work, grumbling to myself about the ungodly hour that I was expected to leave my comfortable bed and wanting to blame my job for just about every problem that exists in my life. You see, this is my first full-time job ever, and its been interesting to try to adjust to spending the large majority of my time every day at work. You may say I have a poor work ethic, and I’d be hard pressed to disagree with you. But I’m getting better.

But I realized today, at some point, that I can’t really blame anybody but me for my recent artistic deficiencies. With just a little bit of thinking during my lunch break I was able to readily come up with two or three things I could write about on my blog, and I recently completed a short story for my ever-delinquent writing group that I’m quite proud of. Things aren’t as bad as I would like to make out, and what is lacking is my own fault. So we found the culprit at last, and it is my persistent laziness, which is, I would have to confess, one of my defining characteristics and the quality most likely to cause me to die feeling that my life was of no purpose to anybody.

Allow me to come to the conclusion without any further ado: I do hereby swear to put more effort into writing for the blog, not just for you, my adoring public, but because I can do it, and I should do it, and I want to do it. I commit myself to two posts a week, at the absolute minimum. And you people must commit to read what I write, and to leave an appropriate amount of comments so that I feel loved and needed. I mean, have you seen my friend Chris Clark’s blog? Twenty to thirty comments for each post! As if he of all people needed his ego inflated any more! They don’t even have to be positive comments, or relate in anyway to what the post is about. I just want to hear from my friends sometimes. Is that too much to ask?

Ok, so I’ve got wry, self-depricating post in the works (as the over-all theme of the blog is, if you haven’t noticed yet, wry self-deprication) so check back in a couple of days. Tell your friends, folks, the Ramblings are back!