It happens. You have ideas you want to explore. News stories you’d like to comment on. Movies, albums, books or TV shows that you think might inspire some interesting assessments. But you never get around to following up on any of this stuff.
Regular visitors to this space may have noticed something glaringly obvious in the last month. There hasn’t been anything new to read since late September. Every now and again, despite one’s best intentions, you go through an unproductive period. You can usually attribute it to laziness, writer’s block and perfectionistic frustrations. But sometimes, there are other reasons for the silence.
Here’s the good news: I haven’t exactly stopped writing. If you manage to find a copy of the October 2009 edition of H Magazine (a strictly Hamilton, Ontario publication) and turn to page four, you’ll find a short piece I wrote about Green Venture, a local non-profit environmental group that presented a seminar on the proper usage of rain barrels on the 17th of this month. (Sadly, there’s no online link available.) And if you click here, you’ll find another short GV item, this one regarding a presentation that took place at Ladies Choice Auto Care on the 22nd. (For some reason, I could only find a cached copy. Unfortunately, the link doesn’t include a nice comment I received shortly after the piece was posted.)
For the record, I’m a volunteer writer for GV and will continue to do stuff for them outside the parameters of this website. Also, I’ve submitted some reviews to MonkeyBiz, the site that published my Ladies Choice article. (I hope all four of those submissions are accepted and posted before the end of the year.)
Besides focusing my creativity on those ventures, rather than here, much of my time has been occupied with a lot of music listening, old entertainment magazines that I’m finally reading after many, many years (I’m down to five piles of Entertainment Weekly, finally), as well as the partaking of numerous TV programs. After taking a two-month break from movie screenings, I’ve been focusing exclusively on horror pictures this past week. (Neither The Invasion, Prom Night (2008) nor Mirrors, bad films all, were worth reviewing here.) It also doesn’t help that I play a number of games on Facebook every day. Huge time waster.
But aside from all of that, I’ve just not had the desire to write on a regular basis lately. It’s difficult to warrant any further enthusiasm for people like Jon & Kate Gosselin (one piece was enough) or add to the relentless coverage of the wacky Heene family or other annoying characters of that nature when so much has already been said. I’ve long lost interest in covering The Toronto Sun’s ongoing problems, and since the election of President Obama, other bloggers like Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com and Jamison Foser & Eric Boehlert of Media Matters For America have covered politics, the continuing implosion of The Republican Party and the sad state of the media so well there hasn’t been anything original worth adding to those important discussions. (Unless you stick your neck out there first before the professionals offer their takes, it’s hard to present fresh arguments.) Ultimately, it’s been difficult to say something different and compelling about any number of topics in recent weeks.
I hope that will change as we head into 2010. I still want to be critical here, I’d love to continue experimenting with poetry (and add fiction to the mix), and I certainly want to offer commentaries when the need arises. Ideas have popped into my head at numerous points in the last month but without the motivation to see them realized in fully developed pieces, they’re pretty much chilling in my cerebral cortex.
Essentially, inspiration has been lacking this past month. But with the end of the year and the decade on the horizon, perhaps it will be history that will get me back on track. In the meantime, I thank you for your patience during this sluggish period. New entries will be coming soon.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, October 30, 2009
11:30 p.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 