Writer’s block is a horrible disease.

It is a strange thing. You feel absolutely the same. You see the same things, you feel what you’ve always felt, you know all the words you used to know. But somehow, nothing seems to happen. It’s disorienting. It’s like you cooking something the same way, year after year, and then, one day, suddenly, you can’t. You put in all your usual ingredients, and you do all the things you’ve always done, which have, hitherto, invariably produced something quite… adequate. You’re known for your soufflés. And then, you lose it. The eggs just curl up, and they die, they simmer into wisps of unrecognizable material, and then disappear.

Your ideas lead nowhere.

Words elude you, a structure lies somewhere just beyond the limits of your vision, offering tantalizing glimpses of something vaguely familiar, but you lose it every time you try to look at it. It is like one of those motes in your eye, do you ever get them? Something at the edges of your vision, floating across the sky, and when you swivel your eye towards it, it slips neatly out of sight, a bashfully malign nothing that puts your teeth on edge.

And there are so many things that ought to have inspired something and all these events that should have had a story inside them: the labor room; the boy who had an evisceration of his eye; the woman who came in with a subconjunctival hemorrhage because her husband hit her.

I expect inspiration now. I need it. It’s a fix like no other.

Writer’s block. I hate it.

I picture it like a fog: a thin sheet of smoke and dust and choking moistness, occupying all the nooks and pushing its tendrils into all crannies that exist between my brain and my skull.

I need to clear my mind. I need to write. I need this.