Sitting across from Lauren Cerand in a cafe in Soho… she’s having sorbet, or maybe I’m having the sorbet and she’s having something else, but she’s saying I should blog. And I’m thinking yes, I will blog. I will enjoy blogging. I will be good at blogging.

Since then, I have been to Venice, to Athens, to Crete, to Mykonos, to Santorini, and in all these places I have thought about blogging. I have blogged in my head. I have blogged about art, about traveling, about the quirkiness of the human race. All in my head. To great success, in my own head. In my own head I have been amazing and articulate.

So now, back in Baltimore, I sit down to blog. First I design my page. I pick colors and fonts. Then I will blog.
It is lunchtime. I change the colors and fonts. It is dinnertime.
It is tomorrow. It is next week.

I sit down to blog.
I have nothing.
This will take some practice. Some discipline. Some courage. Some thought.

Of all the threads of life and work that I muse on all through the day, how can it be when I sit down to write I have nothing? Emptiness, nada, junk, worthless white noise.

Writing is like meandering down a wooded lane. You can be thinking about something, but then a trail of tiny beautiful color rises impossibly out from between a crack in a paving stone, or from the middle of a bank of snow, and you are suddenly thinking about possibilities, about risk taking, about reasons for continuing life in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, and you want to stop walking and put all those beautifully coherent thoughts down on paper immediately. But you can’t. Because there is a reason you are walking down the wooded lane. You are headed to an appointment. Or your computer is back at your home and you are outside of your child’s school. Or you are insanely hungry and must eat before doing anything else, even writing. And so that coherent gem of a thought, that perfect essay or story or poem that presented itself so generously and spontaneously, like a gift wrapped kiss from a lover, is by the time you get around to writing it down, gone. Like the wisp it always was, the merest grazing of neurons in your cluttered brain, a hopeful synapse with no blueprint or recipe for how to recreate it.

Writing is like sitting down to a gourmet kitchen full of ingredients after you have just binged on a Big Mac, and attempting to create an exquisite meal. You must find a way to make yourself hungry again before you can summon the imagination to assemble the ingredients into anything palatable, much less remarkable. Writing is wrestling with the lazy donkey in your stable in order to get him out to the field to plow a furrow in which you fully intend to plant seeds that, when fertilized, watered and weeded, have only the slighest chance of becoming the garden that is the vision in your mind. But meanwhile, you partake of meals that elevate all the senses, you walk through the breathtaking gardens that other people have cultivated and you think, it can be done. These people have done it.

Writing is like that. It is messy and boring and unending and hopeless and insanely optimistic.

I have no idea what blogging is like, but I’m going to find out.