A Decision, and a Half-Assed Attempt

750 words is A LOT. I haven't actually done a word count on the previous two posts because (and I recognize this is getting old already) I couldn't figure out how. But I know I've written at least that much each time, and I know I don't feel like doing it now. Again, it's late. It's 11:46, to be precise, which means it is actually Sunday still, an improvement over last night's post-midnight post, as it were. That's something, I guess, although I can never quite get to the bottom of my last-minute ways. Why am I doing this now instead of earlier in the day? Yes, I was busy, always feel busy, but I made a pecan bread pudding with some stale slices of bread from the refrigerator at about 2 in the afternoon. I could have written then.

I guess what I am getting at is that writing has not seemed urgent to me these days, the way it used to, and I'm not sure why. I used to be inspired to write, fairly regularly, from almost as early as I can remember. In fact, writing this now I just had a vivid memory of myself in second grade at a restaurant with my parents, grandparents and sister and begging a waitress for some extra cocktail napkins because a poem had just occurred to me and I need to write it down RIGHT THEN. I love that about my old self; where did she go?

Although I have had inspirations in the last few years, and do jot down words and phrases in my daily planner for later reference, I rarely am sufficiently inspired to sit at the computer and just write--out of fear that I will lose the idea, the mood, the thread, the moment. Mostly, I just let the moment go, and then the mood, the thread, the idea eventually follows. Mostly, I repress the urgency when it rears its head and decide to do something else instead.

This makes me sad. To be fair to myself, it is partly a function of the way my life is now. I am no longer a child, or living alone, or beholden to nobody. My time is not entirely my own. But it really never was, never is, regardless of the particulars of one's circumstance; there is always something. Sure, there are writers like, oh, I don't know, Styron, of whom his children have said that his writing always came first. But what about Grace Paley? Or Saul Bellow? Or I could come up with a zillion examples of writers successfully raising children or having torrid love affairs or doing all kind of things that must have taken away from their ability to sit down and write.

I guess I am coming to realize the power of decision-making, in this, and in other areas of my life as well. In other words, you can write, or you can make bread pudding. You don't always have to chose writing, of course, but you do have to choose it sometimes. And I don't care how busy I think I am, may even be, there is almost always an element of choice. I'd like to write more about this later, when it's not 12:05 in the morning, this idea of how much choice a person has. But not now. Not in the mood I'm in.

Oh yes: the decision. Although I am, offense-be-not-taken, a non-believer, I actually tried to use the "even God rested on the seventh day" argument with myself about an hour ago, on the way home from dinner with friends. You can skip Sunday, the little shoulder devil cooed. But the shoulder angel prevailed. The subtitle of my blog, were it to have one, would be: seven days a week.