Blank screens and random images

Inspiration?

I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to write this. The idea of a weekly blog giving you the discipline to write something when there’s nothing obvious to write. I don’t mean it’s a bad idea in itself, just that there’s only one time I can get away with doing it. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it will produce such a strong and fertile set of ideas and inspirations that I’ll use it as my subject every week. Maybe it will be an inspiration. Which leads me to the picture – or, as we have to call it these days, the image.

Broken toes

The image is a nonsense photo but everyone tells me there should be an image with a blog and I couldn’t find anything else, so there it is. What does it bring to mind? To me, it suggests the stick man is going to break his toes kicking a rock. Maybe he’s kicking it in frustration, having a change from banging his head against a brick wall. Maybe he doesn’t care any longer. We’re throwing away 40 years of progress for some mistaken notion of sovereignty, jeopardising the Union, peace in Ireland, the environment, our own prosperity and cosying up to to a man not fit to run a raffle who has somehow become President of the US so what’s a little extra pain? I was going to keep off politics this week. Except the Trump stuff doesn’t feel like politics, more like common humanity. How did the Americans manage to elect a man with no moral compass?

On the other hand, maybe our stick man has just been changing passwords on his computer as I have. Why? Because someone tried to hack into my google account. I can’t help feeling they’d be disappointed if they managed it but I’ve strengthened all my passwords as a result which has meant a long afternoon of answering security questions, proving I’m not a robot (more difficult than it sounds) and finding that half the accounts I’d carefully stored passwords etc for don’t remember me anyway. And I had stuff to do. Like writing this.

Venting

So maybe the point of a blog is to be able to vent every now and then, get it all out of the way so I can go back to writing plays and poetry, working on the second draft of the novel, practising Puccini, playing sax. Except I’m now ready for a lie down and a cup of tea. Another one. Too early for anything stronger. At least it avoids writer’s block. Venting, I mean, not tea. Tea drinking, like wine, emails, you tube, and much else can be a displacement activity. I’ve discovered I quite like displacement activity. Maybe there’s a poem in that. So that’s the next task. Writing the poem. Maybe this was worthwhile after all.