My most recent plight to publish has been underway for a number of weeks now, and while not forlorn I am discouraged. So not to cause confusion, I should insist that a number of weeks is not a long time. This is a task which has taken the greatest minds of the English language years. But I’ve yet to really have begun, and am far from having dared to submit a piece and endure the slings and arrows of an editor’s pen. I’ve come short of being visited by even a single linear thought. It seems such a shame that meandering, free associating spatter can flow so easily, but at the merest effort to compose with method or meaning the mind’s eye snaps shut and shunts the supply of words. It cripples the brain and paralyzes the fingers, and I trust even that the choice words would follow and scintillate and dazzle if I could just transcend this substantive impotence. Alas, I am hamstrung by clever and pithy one-liners that float naked on the page as I grasp desperately to conjure some context in which they’ll be read.

Which begs the question: what is it to be read? To write for inner discovery or to sneak a private missive is beautiful and pure; to ejaculate notions onto a page and expect that others will read and care and give credence to your musings is to ask the world to stop and wait a moment as you choose between ham and sausage with your morning eggs. I wonder if there’s bacon. But here we have this public forum to experiment at risk of castigation and ridicule, which seems to distract from the Old College Try. So we hide behind sarcasm and wit (and the first person plural, as though there exists some covert alliance of coward writers, sulking in the shadows with silent expectations that the Paris Review will be calling any moment now to lavish praise on our inconsistent and meandering blogs), telling ourselves that when it’s not received that it’s only because it was an off the cuff shot. Not a serious thing.

But sarcasm manifests as a scowling, pockmarked visage of insecurity, and wit for wit so often is that bastion of self-righteous elitism from which we fling oil soaked flaming arrows at guiltless, guileless passers-by: an ignoble pastime; but in pursuit of sincerity we walk that line between what may be art and self-indulgent melodrama, as fine as the razor’s edge that in an instant cleaves life from flesh (on which side that fell, I can’t be sure). To be sincere and received as not is a crippling proposition, much worse perhaps than riding out a jest taken at face value. So this secret guarded coalition of trepid souls will stay the course and sit and gaze inwardly for that past-due flash of brilliant prose which will receive nothing less than it deserves.