If you’re happy without, do you really need it? Happiness is a result over a measure of time. I need silence. I need a moment alone without distractions or thoughts. That’s my problem: I’m not thinking. I’m not finding time to sit and do nothing. To stare with frustration at a blank screen and wait for it to start yelling at me. I need to duck underneath distractions. I haven’t found the moments alone. Doolies pulls me toward enjoyment, and I want to spend every waking moment in her gravity. It’s enough to escape a few minutes before finding my next opportunity to lose myself in her.

Consternations feel good. I need to let stuff out, like the steam pipe releases pressure to avoid an explosion. It’s good for the pipe (or at least the characters around the pipe) and it’s good for me. It’s not as if I’ve been frustrated lately. While I missed my lonely writing times, I sometimes wonder whether I missed them enough. And yet here I am. Sitting down to stare at the blank screen and write without thinking, in the hopes of thinking before writing.

It’s Sunday afternoon and Doolies and I sit in Solstice, our local coffee house. The music is alternating between quiet and hard riding. Two shots of caffeine course through my bloodstream. I’m a regular coffee drinker now. I wonder how I ever survived with it. It’s no longer the magic elixir of my writing life. Yummy caffeine provides sustenance at work, and alters my unacceptable moods. It doesn’t always work. Drugs are like that. But when it does I am grateful to its restorative powers.

Doolies reads the Jewish Book of Why while I pretend to write. Her Jewish conversion is in a week and a half. Our Living the Jewish Year class is almost at its end. Doolies’s learning process has greatly changed me. I pretended to write an essay that encapsulated these new thoughts, to explain my journey. I hate that word “journey,” but I have no alternatives. Changing is a quest, and in quests, until you find the dusty road, you don’t go very far. The massive silence drove me away from the keyboard and left the essay unfinished. I won’t promise ever to finish it, but it is waiting silently on my hard drive for that moment of clarity and spurt of energy, where I feel its slight quiver drawing me forth.

As I typed that last paragraph, I lost myself in the words. My fingers were a blue blur in my peripheral vision and each word appeared formed and beautiful (as I reread it, the beauty tarnishes and I realize the ridiculousness of my original assessment; it’s as if anytime I write at a decent clip, I take it as a sign of genius as opposed to how the normal course). As I write the explanation of the feeling, both the feeling and the explanation vanish. I guess there are things better left unsaid. When you’re in the zone, you ask for the ball and don’t worry about explaining how you got there. Too much thought has killed too many beautiful feelings.

The word count grows and I say nothing. The barista lowers the volume of a hard-driven song. Have you noticed the similarity between the words barista and barrister?

What I have been thinking of are the larger plans of life. If we’re to accept the premise that life is not meaningless—or, to put it positively, life has meaning—then there’s a way of looking at the meaning that is not apparent even with perfect hindsight. In the sense of storytelling, the individual stories don’t come together in the traditional sense. Even to the characters living the stories, they can’t see it.

I keep my fingers moving. I look away for short moments, trying to find inspiration along the yellow walls and the orange ceiling.

Doodling has been a release for me of spent emotions. I lose myself in for hours. It’s different from writing. When I finish, the accomplishment feels different. I’m glad to have done it, but I don’t feel as if I stumbled upon something new about myself. It’s more an expression than an introspective musing where I arrive at some ah-ha moment. I need to find the balance between the two. Ideally, I’d love to combine them, but I’ve not found the connection.

I’m waning. The two shots of caffeine have fallen on empty subjects. It’s enough to say I wrote something today. I hope to write something tomorrow, and maybe the day after that. To hope for more would be foolish at this early stage.