Fairweather

I was one of those kids who wrote all the time. I wrote when I wanted to and when I was forced to, backdating entry after entry of summer journals I had to keep for high school writing classes, going so far as to change pen color to heighten the false realism. In earlier years I filled composition books with assorted character sketches and the first 500 words to at least as many stories. I graduated to more refined notebooks as a teenager, still nothing above what I could find in the dinky school aisle at the CVS, and posed on their pages what seem now to be tiny questions reflective of a tiny world. But I was insanely proud of those collections of my thoughts, bundles of inflated SAT words and hours of thought that took up no more than a single shelf in my closet.

I used to love writing more than most anything, and not just because my teachers told me I could do it relatively well. It was my red hardcover dictionary, my beloved blue ball points that under no circumstances erased. It was the process of stringing letters and sentences together like popcorn garland. I loved the whole delicious sequence. I once ripped up a blue book, one already half filled with fiction, to take another direction for a high school writing test. Because I could. Because I wanted to. Time constraints meant nothing because they never really can in the absence of pressure. Writing was fun, a sentiment I know could not peg me more as one on the popularity fringe. That scrambling and unscrambling of words was almost effortless unlike those subjects involving Bunsen burners or scientific calculators or circular saws. Or worse, perhaps, the dreaded softball bat.

It’s almost never the same now. The ideas and the process at times seem so forced, like I’m chugging along in wet clothes, like I’ve run out of usable memory. For something that was once so easy, there are days when I want to do few things less. Sit with my thoughts for an hour? There must be something Tivod to zone out to. If not, there’s surely a cat claw to clip or a pile of whites to ignore. Occasionally I’ll refuse the exercise altogether, knowing full well if I didn’t have a site to keep me on point that I’d do the life equivalent of pulling the covers over my head. In dramatic fashion, I’d avoid the computer altogether and regard the bespectacled, wool-sweatered WiFi-ers at Starbucks with disdain. Because it should be different. Because I should still love it oodles more than just more often than not. Because for the others it probably still comes easy.