Friday.
11:55,56,57,58,59,p.m.
My weekly version of the Doomsday Clock.
Minutes To Midnight.
The deadline is in my mind every week, of course. Writing for the Odyssey is no small feat. A piece of writing due every week, topic and content left entirely to your discretion. Freedom from the mundane writing prompts and annotated bibliographies that otherwise plague the English classes and much of your free time. It's both a boon and a curse, rolled into one neat little package. You can write about whatever you want and the length is entirely up to you, due by a certain date. Writer's block is a common malady. Writer's clock is a rare one. It combines the extreme dullness of being able to write nothing at all with the sobering realization that you're running out of time to write anything at all. Fun, fun.
You feel time, an all too precious thing that cannot be reclaimed, tick away as you stare at a blank screen, Dali's melting clock motif seeming almost eerily familiar now. The sound matching your pulse and a million thoughts run through your mind, leaping from neuron to neuron, a miracle of saltatory conduction - but these thoughts go nowhere, instead crashing into themselves and dissolving into dust inside your skull. There's still nothing on the page. A white, mocking emptiness, an opaque mirror telling you that all the creativity you thought you had has stopped reflecting on this blank canvas. Eyes staring at the screen, as glazed as it is blank. Again, nothing.
What do I write about? What topic this week? Do I let it reflect my mood, something going on in the world, something going on with me? A movie, a tv show? Music, perhaps? Something otherwise trivial I should pretend to care about for the sake of an article? Or a soul bearer, perhaps, letting everyone in on a secret I keep away even from myself on the best of days. Or should I write about writer's block while suffering from writer's block? That is, after all, the most writer's-block-like thing to do.
Maybe pepper it with fourth wall breaking internet memes and metaphysical sarcasm to increase its length a little while still leaving overall word count unaffected. Unchanged. Much like my chronic writer's block.
Yes, I'm talking to you, whoever's reading this.
Are you having fun yet, reader, at the expense of my inability to put down any words at all and resort to humor mongering in a futile attempt to prolong this piece of writing, written in a third person sardonic tone that's directly addressing you and at the same time isn't, while imbibing a good deal of passive aggressive tone of voice? Well, that makes one of you.
I'm still going to be here the same time next week, staring down the same barrel of a deadline I know I want to meet earlier each week but yet start abysmally late the day it's due, resulting in sometimes a poor quality product or an article based on a topic that isn't even worth reading because it's so self-indulgent and subversive that writing it in of itself is its own mockery, like the one you're reading right now. Writing an article does take time, no matter what content or topic you're doing that week. It takes longer to write an article than it does to read and appreciate or disapprove of it. I am aware of that fact, but I'm also lazy.I didn't just get my leg caught in the bear trap of meeting the laws of supply in a digital newsstand — I pretty much signed up for it and put my head between the beast's teeth, knowing that the articles would save my literal and metaphorical neck from being chomped down upon. I suffer from the knowledge that I have a whole week to think of article topics while also knowing that someone else is probably writing an article I'll see later on and think 'Man, I wish I thought of that.' I'm also aware of the fact that with each passing week I have one less topic to write about, and must replenish the reservoirs of prompts I'd written down once they've been claimed.
With all this elaborate exposition concerning the two locks writers face the block and the clock — writer's block may be classified as a temporary condition, one that only manifests itself when the article is being written. Writer's clock, on the other hand, is as permanent as time itself. One day, the real clock may run out for us all.
However, until then, I need to make sure I keep the writer's clock ticking.
