Sadness—deep, intractable, incurable heartache or grief or overwhelming sorrow—provides an endless supply of content for writers. That reality gives rise to the question as to whether sadness propels people to become writers or whether writing is symptomatic of a profound, underlying sadness. Does the fact that even comedy, beneath its slick, laugh-stoked exterior, is soaked in sadness have any bearing on the discussion? Probably not. A thousand arguments can be made to refute the connection between writing and sadness. But a thousand more substantiate the link between the two; while no causal relationship can be verified, neither can it be discounted. No one can know with certainty, no matter how much knowledge one has stored in the recesses of one’s mind.
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Once again, I have been up for hours. This morning, I woke “for the duration” at 4. Earlier, I had forced myself back to bed around 12:30. But I could not do it again at 4. Even after being up for almost two and a half hours, I have been unable to write anything I am willing to show to the denizens of planet Earth who stumble upon this blog. Not that I would know they saw it. They would not leave comments to show that they saw what I wrote. They would simply look dismissively at my words and would then move on to more interesting places on the internet.
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I give up. There’s no point in continuing this charade. I cannot write this morning, no matter how much I might want to. I am unwilling to record most of this morning’s thoughts here because I might be asked to explain the source of my ennui; I have no explanation to give. Depression? Anxiety? Simple fatigue? Who knows? Enough for now. Perhaps I will tumble out of the doldrums at any moment.
