Casting about

I have been in the ear­ly throes of what feels like a sort of cri­sis here at The Float­ing Egg late­ly, and it is final­ly spilling out of the closed-up cap­sule that is my soul into some­thing resem­bling the pub­lic view. At the core of this cri­sis is the indis­putable fact that I have not been writ­ing. Peri­od. Nev­er mind for a moment that I have not been post­ing any­thing much, here or any­where else I pur­port to blog. The step before that step is the one I am real­ly and tru­ly con­cerned with; I can’t post if I don’t even write. And I real­ly am not even writing.

I think about writ­ing a great deal. No points for that, though, I am afraid. I stare at my stale blogs, with things I put togeth­er this win­ter still up on the front page, sim­ply because noth­ing else has come along to push them off. I think, boy, I real­ly need to fresh­en this up. And of course it is far eas­i­er to start shop­ping for new themes, fid­dling with col­or palettes and mood boards and typo­graph­i­cal nuances than it is to sit down, take a blank page, and just write. Yet that last is, full stop, the Thing I Need To Do.

So screw re-brand­ing. The old cliché about rear­rang­ing the deck chairs on that big old boat comes straight to my mind: my writ­ing (and sub­se­quent post­ing) of orig­i­nal true prose has noth­ing to do with how many columns or side­bars or wid­gets I have. Noth­ing. My writ­ing has to do with my writ­ing, my actu­al­ly com­mit­ting the act of writ­ing. I need to do that, if I want to con­tin­ue to have any claim to the label of “writer” any­more. Maybe some­where down the road it will tru­ly make sense to update the aes­thet­ic of my win­dow on the world. But not today. Today I need to write.