So many of my blogs seem to start the same way… “Nothing. I have nothing.” It’s not that I don’t have some sort of idea what I want to write about. Some days, that’s quite accurate – I literally have no idea what I’m going to write about. My process usually involves sitting down at the computer and starting to type whatever comes to mind. I like to go ahead and type out some of the basic ideas, just to get something on paper. I then start writing who knows what. I realize that statement doesn’t create a sense of confidence in my writing prowess, but I’m not about to put on a show and act like writing a weekly blog is an easy thing to do. It’s not.
We were visiting some friends this weekend and the wife complimented the blog. The husband said, “It’s just a bunch of words on the page. How hard can that be?” The sarcasm was slightly thick… I think. Truth be told, if you just start hitting keys on the keyboard, coming up with a bunch of words is not that difficult. Just ask my wife. I can talk about Lord-knows-what for Lord-knows-how-long and still not have any idea what the point was.
What I do know is if you want to write something to form a complete thought that potentially inspires someone or creates an environment where folks engage their brain for a couple minutes, you need to become very familiar with the ‘backspace’ and ‘delete’ keys. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can sit down at a computer, pound out a blog in 15 minutes, and hit ‘publish’ - thus dropping the proverbial mic. That’s not me – at least, not tonight. I am completely uninspired.
I’ve been racking my brain for that past 48 hours trying to come up with some sort of moment where I did something stupid, like critique a gas station sign with bad spelling, or maybe something emotional, like cry lumberjack tears over a piece of waste wood. There have been 7 days, 168 hours, over 10,000 seconds of time between the last blog and this one. Surely something happened to stir some sort of emotion. Something had to have happened that I can flip upside down and find some sort of obscure meaning in the happening. Nothing. I got nuthin’.
I actually just wrote over three paragraphs of additional, uninspired, material for this blog, read it to my wife only to have her respond with, “All of that seems rather unnecessary.” So, once again, I got friendly with the ‘delete’ key.
The best part of this is I was inspired to write a blog about being completely uninspired… and now I’m done. All I’m going to leave you with for the 10,080 seconds is a bucket full of irony and the hope that I come up with something worth reading next week.
