I wait and she may come. I push words onto paper and hope for the next inspiration. Throw it against the wall and see what sticks. I live inside myself. I see only what I’ve seen of the outside world, but when I sit, I divorce myself from that world. I need to look further out, to see things as I see them. Start with the world and see how my words affect that world. Live through the words instead of stagnating and spinning my wheels, digging myself deeper across the same thought ad infinitum.

I need to find original thought, see how it doesn’t come out of the blue sky, but by building up worn ideas. It arrives in pieces, after many clichés and known words cross the page. It appears for a moment, and if I’m quick enough, I reach out and pull it onto the page. In its raw form, it doesn’t look different than the rest of the crud. The trick is to see the sparkle deep within the mud and polish it.

Use this time to find those words. When I have nothing to say, I say nothing. Never say that again. Always say that. That’s the problem, I try to censor what I write and I end up writing nothing. Why write? I write because I have to. I write because it feels great to create, brick by brick. With doodling, it all comes out at once. The strong lines followed by the stronger colors. I go back and add the shadows and it looks as if I intended to create the deeper idea. With writing it’s the opposite. When I put words down I don’t end up with strong lines. I find brilliant colors that refuse to obey the boundaries. It’s only when I squeeze those colors and look beyond them that I begin to see that there may be something there, there may be something that just needs a few dark borders to appear.

There is a difference in contemplating my doodles and my words. The doodles happen all at once for the reader. Everyone loves to have that immediate sense of understanding. With writing it takes time for that meaning to approach. It exists not on the surface, when the reader looks only at the words’ patterns, but at a much deeper level. It takes more effort on the part of the reader to uncover the meaning. It takes more work on the part of the artist to find the meaning, to cultivate it, to manipulate it until it has the intended effect. That meaning is always hidden, even to the artist. At best, the artist can sometimes see the pattern, manipulate the story and the characters and the ideas to provide an emotional lift and a purpose in hindsight. In the end, there is nothing he can do once he creates the words. They exist outside of him. They are no longer his words but the world’s words. They are the monkey’s words.

Even this short essay shows signs of this idea. I’m not happy with these words. They aren’t clever and they don’t entertain. I set out to write something and I find myself in this hole. Not all holes are worth digging, just like not all skies are worth painting.

We fly over Japan heading to Taiwan. The flight has been easy. I slept and ate and read, and now I jot down words. Kurt Vonnegut inspires me even though I haven’t started his book. Doolies is reading A man without a country, the closest thing he ever wrote to an autobiography. It’s next on my list after I finish The man in the high castle, by Philip K. Dick, a deeply troubling story of the world gone wrong, where the Germans and Japanese win World War II and leave the world in a jilted state. It is meta-fiction at its best: at the heart of the book, the characters read another book about how the world would have been different if the Germans and Japanese lost the war. It is not our present, but a present, as divorced from reality as the novel’s original theme.

I feel my energy waning. After we land, I’ll check into the hotel and judge their internet service. We have our first day ahead of us, and I’m almost rested enough to enjoy it. That feeling may change in a number of hours, however.

I feel as if there is more I want to say. I don’t have anything I want to say, it’s just that I want to revel in this feeling of writing again. I don’t know where it escaped to. I don’t know how I can sit at home and not reach for the keyboard more often. I’m kept at bay by those feelings of failure and frustration. It’s a feeling of wanting to write and yet feeling as if I have nothing I can say. I have no new words or ideas that I can impart in people because none of my words or ideas is worth imparting. It’s strange how that works. I’m trapped on an airplane and all I can think to do is move my fingers across the keys and hope that I grunt a bit. You’re reading those senseless grunts.

With my three-person audience, it’s difficult for me to believe that any of these grunts are worthwhile. Doolies told me that I should write more like Vonnegut: simple, to the point, funny. She said my letters had that feel. I don’t know how to write stories or even essays with that letter feel. I become backed up, trying to be deeper, more clever, until I’m clogged beyond the means of the plunger.

I look around at the people, their televisions pulled up and their blankets keeping them warm in the early Taiwanese morning. My escape is close. The red, blue, green, purple, and gold cover of my book calls on me. It has something it wants to say and yet I have nothing I want to say. But I want to keep trying. The more words I throw out the better the chance of a stain. I want people to look at that stain and tell me that there’s something there. That someone created that stain, and for whatever it’s worth, it exists. Perhaps it’s what I want: immortality, some way to survive beyond the quality of these words.

Peek into my brain and see what makes it tick. See the words that flow across the years. Every day, every dollar, every minute, there’s always something more I want to tell. I need to throw it together, tell it, stop pretending like there’s anything that can’t be said, that I won’t say. Each idea needs a bubble. Each thought a carriage. I need to expend the effort required, stop hiding behind the laziness and righteousness of failure. Who care if I ever write a novel? I only care that I’m trapped in a place long enough to pound out the monkey words.

None of this is well thought out or meaningful. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a stream-of-consciousness writing that ends up at the base of the mountain. It leaves you looking up to the heavens, knowing there is something else out there, something above you that the author is trying to say. He never does say it. I never do say it. That’s my lot in life. To set up the base camp and never leave the tent. Never brave the winds or the altitude, never take that next step where risk and effort await. I make a good talk and when it comes time to look back at the good talk, I see it for what it was: empty words over an empty sky.