Shooting the curl and displaying my pancreas.

A friend encourages me to write. Which I do as a writer/editor for hire, with the frowning, clinical remove of a pathologist taking out a dipsomaniac's liver. But she wants me to write write. Like, you know, blog, journal, reach inside myself, mulch fingers around in lymphy interstices, grab hold of my innards and put them, dripping, on display.

Take my spleen—please.

She has a point—beyond books on the institutionalization of user experience, zingy headlines about candy bars or the occasional email of apology (it's late, I don't have the bandwidth, I can't make it to the bar-mitzvah)—I write nothing. I sit inert, a ball of Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough, filled with sweetness, potential, and complex, nutritionally useless chemical chains. I conceptualize farces, lampoons, burlesques; elegiac, generation-defining novels. None of them happen. Nor is any of what I do write—or think about writing, more to the point—in any way self-revelatory.

To be fair, in those rare moments when I do I leave my pen unsupervised, well, boy howdy, it weighs fulminant, self-directed invectives, bilious screeds aimed at a failure to write, sort out my debts, get out of my parents' attic, get the girl, get on with life, become something. Which, OK, fine, it's a fair cop…but that's an hour wasted. Necessarily wasted, mind you, because you have to paddle out there, straddle your board and and wait out a few sets in a seaweed patch before you catch a wave. Not to get all blond-dreadlocked about it, but eventually it will come along, wave, topic, whatever, so you write/paddle furiously, hop on at just the right moment and then it just, like, happens. Ride it in to the beach.

I'm not winning any surf contests here, or writing contests, and still may not be offering up much for the organ harvesters. My critics—God love 'em, I have critics!—will still call me shallow, evasive, emotionally dishonest. Whatevs. I say that with the greatest love and respect. But once you're on top of it, see, sliding down the face or—best yet—full-on tubed, it's all the same. The deepest longings, darkest moments and a tidal swell of other connections, transpositions and imaginings are all so much fluid sliding up and over you in a dark crest of knowingness, form flashing bright along its edge and sweeping up truth, unreality, mind, body, now and an ever-receding then into an implacable thing and depositing you on the sand

and fuck it's 5:00 and what have you really accomplished?

So it's a little complex.