Writing through the muck.

It’s been a rough few days in the office, and it seems that everyone has hit a trough at the same time.

After weeks if not months of intensity, this week has been like walking through cobwebs, or swimming in molasses, or, as my old man used to say, pushing water uphill.

Some people, of course, have put the fault in the stars, and blamed Mercury, which seems forever in retrograde, whatever the fuck that means. For me, it’s far more likely—painfully real, in fact—that earth is in retrograde as more and more people embrace the simian leadership of the Trumpocalypse, not to mention nazi-cosy Marie Le Pen.

Other people have looked outside our plate-glass and seen four straight days of grey and the deadening incessancy of rain and said that the outside gloom has infiltrated the inside.

Gloom or no gloom, Mercury or no, I am on my way into work early—I should arrive by 7:15, to face down this mental stupor. I have a deadline of tomorrow on something that needs writing—and while I am usually as prolific as a rhyme-for-hire poet, lately I have been as barren as Donald Trump’s hairplugs.

The only way out of this is to write. And keep writing like those infinite monkeys at infinite keyboards who will eventually type, “What a piece of work is man.”

Sorry, really, that the blog has sucked lately. My sullen side has been ascendant, or should I say, more ascendant than usual. And it’s made me less of a writer and less of a person.

But today, at least for a couple of hours, I will drive a stake in my sullenness. I will ignore feelings of ineptitude. I will shake off my self-doubts and throw on, no matter how contrived it is, a temporary cloak of confidence.

And write.

Until I feel good again.