You know, it occurs to me that the phrase "like a broken record" really doesn't have much meaning for kids raised in the era after vinyl. "Like a skipping CD" doesn't mean the same thing either as CDs tend to skip ahead or skip around and, anyway, don't reliably skip back and play the same piece of the song over and over. Perhaps the popularity of old school rappers and folks like Beck might at least keep the idea of record scratch around.

In fact, "like a broken record" makes me feel the same way as saying "beating a dead horse" or "like a bad penny" does. Kids today don't know from horses and one day soon the penny will be out of circulation. And that will leave me with my adages, which I'll spew forth our the window of my dank apartment at the kids on the lawn.

So what skips? A stone across the water? Do people do that anymore, or has that gone the way of feeding the ducks? Are there still ducks? "Like somebody keeps hitting the Tivo rewind" might work. Maybe "Like an acid loop". I dunno. I'm still working on it.

Nevertheless, here I am back with the same thoughts that I've had before. But that's okay. Each time I revisit the same place, I come to it with a new understanding and a better grip.

Thing is, when I'm not feeling quite like myself, I've found that I write things as if I'm playing myself in a movie or on stage. I know the way I talk and the way I think and express myself, and I even know what I'd expect out of me were I to see somebody perform as me. As a side note, my attempts recently to expel Gerald Depardieu as the top pick of who would play me in a movie and replace him with John Corbett is not going that well. Depardieu is more than a fine actor, but who wants to look enough like him so that he is constantly picked to play you?

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Schwarztman, Holly Hunter… rrrrawr! Gerald Depardieu? Can I at least get a John Cusack again? Used to always be John Cusack. What happened?

But where was I? Yes, when I'm not feeling quite like myself, I find myself acting as if. The concept of act as if works well for social situations, gives me a great deal of ability to remove myself from bad turns and sadness. But I don't think it has a place in my writing. I feel disingenuous, but more to the point, I feel like I'm not capturing my mood at the moment, like I'm blocking my emotion by subverting it into a channel that is consistent with how I view myself as a writer and how I think others view me. I say what the Me-player should be saying instead of what I want to say. Or, if I can't do that, I just remain quiet and say nothing.

I've realized this weekend that I never have writer's blocks. I have writer's squeezes. It's like my own fist is clenching down on my flowy mind and squeezing harder and harder so that something always gets out, but what gets out might be a small trickle compared to what is being held back. It ebbs and flows, depending on many factors and stresses in my life, always letting some measure out, never strong enough to close the fist.

I don't mind the control or rather the selective choice of expression when it is applied to structured works, writing on an essay or piece of fiction when I feel moved to do so, or when the piece itself is wanting to be explored. I don't mind not writing on those things when I feel fallow or when I've had a very eye-strainy kinda day, or when I'm not feeling well or when I only have 15 minutes before bed and am half asleep.

But what I mind is feeling like my feelings can shut off all writing. And that's what I've been doing in many ways.

When I started this journal, it was to have a place to blather. This is a Live Journal. It's not professional, won't make my writing career, has no purpose other than to share and to witness and to connect. It's a page online amongst millions of pages online. It doesn't matter at all. It has no purpose other than what I decide it's purpose is. It's never going to be a place where other people can really be exposed to what I have to say, apart from my community and my friends.

But when this place is the only place, it has to have every purpose. It's like being in a relationship and having no friends, expecting your partner to provide everything for you that you seek from connection. It's claustrophobic and dysfunctional and you end up resenting it in the end as much as you end up clinging to it desperately.

One of my first conversations with imtboo was how her journal was a place to clear the swamp. But if you don't have any plans for the swamp once it is cleared, the exercise become a bit tiresome. "Why does this swamp have to be cleared everyday," you might ask of the heavens, and eventually you might just decide to stop showing up for work, because maybe the swamp just wants to be left alone.

And so I return, again for the dozenth time, to the idea that I really need to be spending energy on external, structured, sharable writing projects at the same time that I'm posting the cobwebs and the jingling and the shiny bits and the shadows here. I need both approaches running simultaneously in order to be functioning from a good creative place. And I need to return to a post a day, even if that post is one paragraph with a bunch of words that make no sense. If that's what I'm feeling, that's what I want to be writing. Otherwise, the swamp just gets too full of branches and junk and alligator wrappings and I can't find the lost civilizations for all the leeches and brackish sinkholes.

But more to the point, I don't want to write anymore as if. And I mean in anything. That's not speaking or living my truth and it makes me feel like a charlatan. And there's a big difference between a trickster and a quack. What I'd like to do instead is write from honesty and see where what I'm writing belongs. I'd guess most often, it belongs here, which really should be the default. But it's only in writing through that things emerge that also belong other places, as well of the emergence of what kinds of things those other places want to be fed.

And that's where I am today. I'm also using words like "charlatan" and "quack", so I might as well be using "shenanigans". Does anyone else really know what these things mean? Am I the only one still using those words in normal conversation? I feel like I'm 130 years old here.

I'm going to go and drink my ovaltine.