A swing and a miss.

I got a late start this morning.

While I am usually sitting in my home office and scribbling in the space by 7 or 7:30, I had things I had to do this morning and could not sit down to write.

I tried again--my plan B--in the car I take to work, but again, no dice.

Now I am at my table at work with 12 minutes to go before the onslaught of meetings hits me, and I haven't a thing to write about.

Back when I played for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA) so many summers ago, I had an extraordinarily bad stretch where I went 19 games, 74 at bats, without a hit--a skein of futility rarely matched at any level.

Hector, the Buddha of the Bush Leagues, was stoical about it.

"You keep swing," he said, "the hit come."

But I kept swinging and missing. A streak not unlike the great DiMag's, only mine was bad, while his was unsurpassingly good.

I fear I'm entering another such fallow period. Perhaps it is the gloomy, for me, time of year, and an almost paralyzing amount of work.

Whatever.

As Hector told me nearly 43 years ago: "You keep swing, the hit come."