My Slippery, Slopeitty, Soapitty Soap Box

Sometimes, I get blogger's block.

It doesn't happen often, but, after 468 posts, I guess it's easy to imagine how blogger's block happens from time to time. It usually happens when I blog in the early morning hours (I've gotten smart about writing at alternate times of day and scheduling posts to appear at 7:18am), before I have had coffee, and I sit in front of the computer screen with my mouth slightly agape and my brain sloshing around gently like a serving of rotten applesauce. I'll take a look through the local and national papers to see what there is to comment on, sometimes I check out 20something bloggers or Facebook to see if there is some fecund banality or fecal anality about which I might have something to say.

Sometimes, I'll just have breakfast with my father or get an email from my sister and the blog just writes itself.

The thing about blogger's block is that it's actually very helpful. It reminds you that your brain is not an endless source of creativity and witticisms, that, sometimes, it's perhaps a good idea to just shut the fuck up. Maybe blogger's block is like your stomach telling you that you're full after your eighth helping of mashed potatoes and gravy at Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, shutting up (and not eating more mashed potatoes and gravy) is not something that's terribly easy for me to do. And so I tend to look at blogger's block in a slightly different way. When I get stumped about what to write about, when I'm not sure I can be funny or poignant, I take the quiet opportunity to remind myself that this blog is my opportunity to share perspectives with an audience, albeit a relatively small audience, to say something that may carry meaning or make a difference in how you view your day or the people in it. This is my opportunity, my only opportunity, really, to make some kind of a statement or a difference-- and why should I squander that chance by being silent for a day, just because I'm not sure I can string together a coherent thought?

I mean, that doesn't seem to stop most people.

As I was exploring topics on which to blog this morning, individually they didn't seem to particularly hold my interest, though, collectively, they did, and they kept bringing me back to a quote that I love very much, a quote that appears at the end of each of my emails, in the signature line.

"If they want inspidity, they shall have it."

Can you guess who said that, class?

If you glowingly smiled, raised your hand energetically, arching your back everso slightly so that your flimsy cotton t-shirt stretched just so over your taut bosom and answered "William Schwenck Gilbert" then, congratulations, dear! You're right! You get to see me after class.

* wink *

But, seriously, my little pervelettes, think about that little quote for a moment. That Gilbert was a sharp wit, an acerbic and cunning social commentator, and his pen hardly ever ceased over the course of his long life.

And I wonder-- if W. S. Gilbert had a blog today, would anybody read it? If he had been born in any other era, would he have been a successful librettist, or could he only have done what he did in Victorian England, and only with his famed, equally brilliant musical collaborator, Arthur Sullivan? What would he have been if he had emerged into adulthood in 2010?

Quite possibly, not very much. It's hard to imagine him staging kittens playing on playground equipment, filming the antics and putting them up on YouTube. But maybe that's what he would have been reduced to. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Gilbert did love kittens.

I Can Haz Mikado?

If you take a moment to seriously consider what our lives are like today, where we seek our entertainment and what's being offered to us, the word "insipidity" cannot but help to intrude its ugly head into our brains. What have we become satisfied with as a culture? On Broadway, supposedly the epoch of innovation and serious talent, all we see are big name movie stars appearing in revivals or hyper-extended runs of whatever was successful five or ten years ago, or piss-poor take-offs and regurgitations of films and/or T.V. shows. "Addams Family" musical anyone? Just have Thing poke out my right eye, then rip my penis off and skull fuck me with it.

Reality television has, of course, been slowly killing us for years now, providing us with endless doses of insipidity before we're even able to digest and rid our bodies of yesterday's insipidity. It's making us more stupid, more shallow, more intensely disinterested in substance, and more deeply invested in something that never did and never will actually matter. It is insipidity of the highest order, and, apparently, we want it. The ratings, regrettably, don't lie.

This begs the question, of course-- do we want insipidity, or is that just all there is? And, if that's all there is, is that because it's what we want? I don't want to get too much egg all over my chicken here, but I don't really know what the answer is. Another question that I'm a little scared to ask is, is this blog offering anything different-- is it part of the problem or part of the solution? I'd like to think that, because there isn't a colonic full of YouTube clips of fat kids drumming on their desks and singing in falsetto or elderly ladies from the Midwest engaging in celery-carving competitions that maybe this blog is taking a stand against eye-candy and meaningless triviality but, really, I'm not so sure. Isn't it just another masturbatory self-exploration replete with vanity, unhelpful criticisms, profanity, obscenity, libelous slander (sorry, Meredith Vieira) and not-too-creative, mean-spirited modern snark? I'm certainly not out there in the public sphere creating great art. I'm sitting in my office at home wearing a hoodie and I haven't shaved yet today.

Or had coffee.

Clearly.