The Snares of Indecision: Writer's Block for Dummies (and shrimp)

Well, as you can see, this is my paltry second post. No, I haven't forgotten about this blog, and although I might sometimes procrastinate, in this case, I have found myself dumbfounded and silenced by my own indecision. It's all the same- I come downstairs after sending the kids to bed, sit in front of my computer with this same old text editor, and almost immediately, my mind goes blank. It's absolutely uncanny! If I were driving, working, listening to lectures in class, it would be a different story. I have a multitude of ideas from various spheres that I could write on. Absolutely anything that can grace a human mind- I assure you- has graced mine. Yet as soon as this little white window pops up and a blank screen confronts me, it goes. My intuition? My mind? Possibly a little more of my sanity and patience? Yep, all gone.

I often wonder how writers like Emerson dealt with writer's block- or if they ever did at all. Surely, anything goes in the realm of transcendentalism or poetry- anything can be a topic from reliance of the self to death to even toothpaste tubes refrigerated plums! I imagine that these writers would look down disapprovingly at my empty page and shake their heads. "So much potential." I can even hear it on their lips, the palatal clicking sound of what could have been.

So, in order to salvage some of this blog and turn it around, this article will not entirely be about writer's block, or the writer's process, or even the writer's outright frustration. Here, we shall switch gears and talk instead about shrimp.

Why shrimp? Well, I grew up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. As a matter of fact, my house was only about 10 miles from the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama. Please, save your jokes for after the blog. Anyway, we would frequent the beach numerously in the summer. Walking in the white hot sand and feeling that salty sea zephyr catch in my hair and blast my ear is a fond, fond memory for me. One other memory that resonates with me is the seafood. Much of the Gulf economy is dotted with small time shrimping operations right around the coast from Mobile around Biloxi and onward west to New Orleans. There was a time or two where I can remember walking along the pier with my parents and purchasing buckets upon buckets of fresh Gulf shrimp.

I will tell you, there is almost nothing better than fresh, Gulf Shores shrimp. The succulent meat of that little bottom crawler stays tender and semisweet and, with just a tiny tang of cocktail sauce, Nirvana itself is procurable. Of course, there is the work of shelling, cleaning, veining and either cooking or prepping the shrimp; especially if the bucket is right off the boat. However, the seawater taste of fresh shrimp is completely worth the effort.

It saddens me these days to see that our major seafood resturants have chosen to sacrifice that delectable quality of fresh, local shrimp for the cost effectiveness of foreign shrimp. Chinese and Malaysian mud bugs may be farmed in large quantities overseas and shipped by the crateful to waiting seafood chains and distributed even further to individual resturants without the slightest inkling that shrimp afficionados can and do know the difference between fresh from the pier shrimp and weeks old, freeze dried mud bug meat. Disgusting.

That's why when you go to eat seafood, you absolutely must make the trip. Stake out a resturant on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Find the one that doesn't import. And enjoy. Not only is the fresh shrimp worth it, but also the knowledge that you are supporting the local, regional shrimp fisherman and helping to restore a little of the suffering dignity of our cultural tastes.

Out of a sense of arbitrariness, the next post will probably be about upholstry.

Why I cannot Stand Melville

For a long time now, I've always held my own private antifada against Hemingway. I did not like him throughout high school, even though I had been assigned to read his work several times. I felt that he left too much up for grabs in his work, and the repetition of only a few themes in several of his novels made the reader feel as dizzy and drunk as many of his main characters. Yet, the more I read from him, and the older I get, I suppose his work, though minimalist, is not terrible. He leaves many questions up in the air as he writes, and he invites the reader to participate almost as much as he does in the works. Short stories like "Hills like White Elephants" and his book, "A Moveable Feast" has made me appreciate his work a lot more these days.

It's Melville I can't stand now. Why is it absolutely necessary to have a book of over a hundred chapters about whaling? I'm sure, with the recent surge in interest of commercial fisherman and the crab industry, like Discovery Channel's long running series, Deadliest Catch, that there would be a few more select readers of the fishing genre, but I am not one of them. I even grew up near a port and I know somewhat first hand that there is not that much to write about! Not enough, anyway, to fill a hundred chapters. And while I know that this work is a classic, and is well regarded by critics all over, I must say it reminds me of a guy I knew in high school who wrote great short stories, but woe to the person who wished to read his novel.

It was over four hundred pages long, and the first three chapters were, apparently, about some pseudo historical explanation of why the book needed to be so long in the first place.

As a fellow writer, and a poet, I cautioned him on knowing that his audience wouldn't possibly sit still long enough to read three chapters of prologue, and urged him to shorten it to one, even if it was an extremely long chapter, it would infinitely be better than three. I don't know if he ever did, but I do recall my wife- then girlfriend at the time- saying that he had passed around the novel in her English class and it had gotten longer since before.

Know your audience, and what they can tolerate. And I don't know if it's just me, but Melville is not one of those for me.

Short Introduction

Despite what the title claims, or perhaps I should say, contrary to what a short introduction may seem to be, I feel compelled to analyze the composition and history of the short introdu-

Oh, hello. Let me start again, as I see some of you were already dozing off.

Welcome to my blog! Sorry about the mess, I'm still renovating. You may be wondering: why did Nick (if that's my real name) pick such a simple title? Well, it's complicated. Or rather, I am complicated; I feel I wanted to let you off the hook just this once, so as not to seem too pedantic or incorrigable. Although sometimes I can be. And other times I'm just plain weird.

You're probably wondering what this blog aspires to become, or what it's about. To answer that, I have to break it to you gently: I am not sure yet. But I'm sure it will be something worthwhile. A little literature, a little music, some poetry readings perhaps? Why not? And, of course, anything else that may come to mind. As I said before, this is where kinetic thoughts come to their natural state. Entropy. This is where seemingly good thoughts with potential and poise come to die. So Welcome. For anybody with second thoughts, the exit is always in the same place: where you first came in.