03.15.06 Creative Constipation

I’m constipated right now.  Creatively speaking.  I don’t get “writer’s block”.  You can build with a block, stack a block, stand on the stack and reach the hit song on the top shelf.  I’m not a complete idiot: I know “block” in this particular metaphor is more about being clogged, stopped up, unable to flow.  But it’s still open to a positive interpretation - it still has a bright side (that word “block” and it’s other meaning) - but having it, having writer’s block, isn’t at all positive.

So I prefer constipation as the metaphor.  That’s how “writer’s block” really feels.  It feels like there’s something that truly needs to come out - it would be very healthy, I think to myself, for this to come out of me, I need it to come out or I might be sick and even possibly die - but it won’t.  It sits there stubbornly lodged in the large intestine of my mind, or fingers or wherever it is good ideas hide out while they’re being processed.

This constipation leads to irritation which would lead to eradication (of myself) if I thought that I, a song writer/article writer/sermon writer by trade, would never, you know, “go” ever again.  But I always get unclogged somehow...eventually.  Something always comes along and acts as the metaphoric bran muffin to get me making musical number twos good enough to be number one on some chart somewhere.  Suddenly I run to the piano or to a napkin with pen in hand and a mind swarming with a buzzing cloud of bee-like bits of melody and rhyme.  And I take dictation feverishly.  Eventually the brainstorm ends, usually in a matter of minutes, and I’m left in awe of this thing that just shot out of me, out of nothingness, out of the total wasteland that was my head.  Amazing.