A series of rants - No.5

Rant #05

While I sit at my kitchen table, pondering as to what the content of this column should include, a thousand million ideas flash through my brain. Unfortunately, none of these neuron-nuances have produced a definitive cognitive response. In other words I have writer's block.

The only reasonable thought to stay nestled in my cranium is to write: WATCH THIS SPACE, leaving the remainder of the column blank. It would certainly be 'akin to' what is resident in my conscience! Still I am no closer to completing what is slowly becoming an arduous task.

As I plough through dust covered tomes, assembled to provide an evolutionary spark of inspiration, I am struck by a sudden, jaw-dropping deduction: my mind is still blank. Reminiscent of those times others ask if one takes sugar with their tea, an authoritative figure asks for your date of birth, or when your ultimate idol is flesh-and-blood-REAL in front of you. Dumbfounded, speechless, gob-smacked; it all amounts to the same: the brain is being selfish, with-holding information.

Perhaps I am failing in my attempt to push the correct buttons: the cumulative effect of mass-media is mesmerising; an overload to a delicate system called thought. Could this be the root of my problem?

Of course, there are times when one wishes the collective cells of the brain would be less coherent and present an expanse of things to say; the concession for verbal diarrhoea. These often occur at the most inopportune of moments - those who feel the unearthly need to apologise when they obviously not in the wrong, talk in a cinema, or sit next to you on an already intolerably long bus journey while spouting their life history. Or feeling it necessary to divulge the results of a football match you were hoping to view from video!

Even now though, I am still no closer tom a fair representation of my repartee, or extolling the omnipotence of the written word.

So now, after endless cups of black coffee and a lung-busting consumption of cigarettes, I have arrived at the conclusion that creating a readable column from twenty-six letters of the alphabet is not my forte. While Shakespeare and his contemporaries have managed to complete literary masterpieces, volumes of manuscripts, and general writings without resorting to banging their respective heads against a brick wall, the five words which consolidate my random thoughts into fluid, intelligent and interesting text are really the get-out-clause of the lazy and asinine individuals: I have nothing to say!