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Month: October 2020

The 2020 Rut

Hola, amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve rapped at ya, but I’ve been busier than a one-armed fiddler with the crabs!

Well, no. Not really.

Actually, I’ve been pretty stagnant. Maybe “paralyzed” is a better word, as it implies outside forces beyond my control, acting on poor ol’ innocent me. I blame 2020.

This has been a fraught year for everyone everywhere, and it’s been especially here in good ol’ Portland, Oregon where I live and work. Of course, there is the political angle to the general Suckiness of 2020, but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole – at least not on the Sweet Weasel Words blog. (If you’re really interested, check out the American Knucklehead podcast site.)

Suffice it to say that I would be a considerably happier camper if I had the wherewithal to shut myself off from the 24-hour news cycle. But I can’t; I’m a news junkie, and my attempts to throttle my news consumption has always been short-lived and largely ineffective. Maybe there’s a twelve-step group available for news addicts.

Regardless, as the year has worn on and the avalanche of stupefyingly depressing news stories have absolutely tanked my initiative to do just about anything, including writing. It feels like I’m constantly in a reaction zone where the only thing that seems palatable is the old and comfortable. There’s enough novelty – and most of it horrifying – coming through my cell phone and computer, thank you. It’s hard to get enthusiastic for anything that might stress me out further.

Even enjoyable things like writing and reading seem like a chore now. For example, I eagerly awaited the release of William Gibson’s delayed novel Agency. I got my dirty mitts on it right around the time Covid hit, and I was so flabbygastered that I could barely concentrate on the story. About seven chapters in, I realized that I had no idea what was going on or who the characters were. I put it on the shelf, and spend the summer readin Stephen King novels that I had read many times before.

This same inertia applied to my writing (and blogging, obviously) – and has only gotten worse as the year wore on. By the time we had gotten past Labor Day, the only writing I could muster consistently was a hand-written journal which since early March has been labelled “Plague Journal.” I was completely locked up as a writer.

Then I had a Cunning Plan.

I would simultaneously start three writing projects, so that there was more variety to choose from:

  • A new novel about stand-up comics that has been on the back burner for several years.
  • An episode or two of the American Knucklehead podcast
  • A short story based on expurgated chapters from an unpublished novel manuscript called Fester.

This started out as an effective Cunning Plan, and I was soon gleefully cranking away on the comedian storyline (working title: Laughingstock). The idea was that I would always have something engaging to write, and that I would jump from project to project as the day’s whim dictated.

Except that it didn’t work out that way. Basically, I got a few chapters into Laughingstock, hit a wall, and lost all interest – again. Oh, I eventually finished writing the political screed for Knucklehead, but whether I actually engineer and publish it is still an open question. And the Fester short story still languishes, even though the main structure of the story has already been written.

So be it. I should be happy that I was able to write the Laughingstock chapters and the podcast script – and this blog entry. I’ll call that a win, although I probably won’t have the gumption to add an entry to the Plague Journal today. Good enough, call it a win. Things get bad, then they get better again. Salud!