My days are filled with moments, seconds, minutes and hours when I cannot write and/or do not write. This includes times when it is physically impossible to write, or even scribble, like, when I am driving or when I am lying face down under a towel on the massage table of a spa with a woman’s tender hand on my thoracolumbar fascia (is that a bone or muscle or one of Jupiter’s satellites?) or I am having my half yearly single lap in the swimming pool. And then there are those occasions when it may be possible to write but it requires a lot of ingenuity, effort and determination. Like when I am in the midst of a rehearsal of a play or a very boring meeting, or having a drink in a noisy and half dark bar, or having a frosty argument with my wife or just while taking a shit. Come to think of it, it’s not that difficult to write while taking a shit, unless you are taking one of those emergency dumps at an airport or a five star hotel or a mega-mall. But my love for reading and unstinted commitment towards time management for last 25 years, has forced me into a habit of reading when I am in the loo. It’s such a compelling habit that at times I am in a state of nerve wracking distress on the ledge of the bathroom door, while my daughter and wife are desperately rifling through the bookshelf or magazine racks to find something suitable for me to read inside. Ok that’s all about my scatological routines; in gist, I read while shitting and thus I cannot or do not write. There are some other times when I can perhaps write but I do not because of simple ethical dilemma. Like when I am in office. No. I was lying. I do not write in office, not because of an ethical dilemma, but because of the fear of being found out by my juniors and other colleagues and thereby facing a disgraceful end to a brilliant career and the sight of my daughter going to a municipal school and me drinking arrack in stead of $40 vodkas and single malts. Life is tough for a truant author. Or should it be a truant corporate executive having delusional aspirations to be an author?
Anyway, it is an imperative to come to the point after a fairly long digression at the very beginning (my fatal weakness, and natal too). It is just that my days are filled with times when I do not or cannot write. Interestingly, it still leaves me with a fairly decent amount of time in a week or month (aggregated over the miserable days) when I can write. But funnily, or rather sadly I must say, sadly in a totally pathetic way of a loser, during these times, I do not write. I do not write when I am free to write, because I cannot figure out what to write. I do not have anything to write; no ideas, no stories, no heart rendering emotions to write a poem about, no visions, nothing, nada. Zilch. So, if at all I open an empty page and wield a pen or pressing ctrl+n in Microsoft Word, with an intention to write and with some modicum of determination to persevere for at least 15 minutes, then I sit for all those 900 seconds, in front of the blank page in a blended state of fear, anticipation, crappiness and emptiness. Like a woman heaving on the delivery table with no baby inside her womb. What a fucking pain!!
On the other hand, when I am not in a position or disposition to write, I get all the ideas. But that is a different story altogether.
