You write to entertain your family and friends.  You sit down with a cup of coffee and you lay your fingers on the keyboard.  Words escape from your brain like wine from your cellar.  You stare at the screen.  You update your Facebook profile.  You sip your coffee.  You navigate to MLB.com and read up on the latest baseball news.  You go to the bathroom with the Sports page in your hand.  You finish.  You walk back to your computer with a newfound purpose to write about your incredible bowel movement.  You ask yourself, who wants to read about your shit?  Your mother in-law and then your wife descend from upstairs and both mutter the same thing, “Buenos Dias, Carlitos” and they head into the kitchen to make their breakfasts.  You’ve already eaten your instant oatmeal and are ready to get busy.  You tell yourself to remember to blink.

Nothing surfaces in your brain.  You stand up, you do 20 pushups, you stretch out your legs.  You listen to Pandora.  You stare outside the living room window to draw inspiration.  It’s time to go workout.  You’re mad at yourself for not coming up with anything.  You’ve just spent the last 90 minutes drinking 3 cups of coffee and going to the bathroom.  You figure the elimination of waste is better than nothing.  You put on gym shorts, a tee shirt, and a fleece sweatshirt.  Your gray one, because you think it makes you look hot.  You’re in your 50’s.  You’re not hot.

You punish your body for 60 minutes by warming up, doing squats, bench presses, dead lifts, clean and jerks, tricep curls, bicep curls and then more legs.  You love the burn.  You stretch out your pulsating muscles.  Sweat drips off your nose.  You think if only you could write freely it wouldn’t be so much effort as exercise.  You feel better for having worked out but worse.  Pulsating in your brain should be so much easier.

You go for a 5 KM run.  Your iPod blares songs by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow.  You meet back up with your wife at her car.  She has finished her yoga class and is ready to go home, make you lunch, and take her mom shopping.  You climb into the car and complain you have no idea what to write about this week.  You feel like a loser.

At home, you lie on the couch, you eat, you watch the Shawshank Redemption for the 100th time, you kiss your wife goodbye, you turn off the TV and you settle in for a nap.  You wake up in 30 minutes refreshed and forget about your writer’s block.  You dive into the Rosetta Stone website and spend an hour learning Italian.  You stink.  You need a shower.  You want to write but you know your wife and mother in law will be home soon and they’ll be asking you to put away the groceries.  Arrivederci!

You blow off the shower and start writing.  You really have nothing witty to say or an interesting point of view.  The ladies come home and you put the bags on the kitchen counter and return to the computer and you start to write. You write about your day.  Your sad, pathetic, day hoping that in the words perhaps someone might find this interesting, original, and worthy of their precious time.  You are, after all, an artist.  You view the world differently.  You are creating something out of nothing.  Whether or not you want to believe it.