nothing to write about

The hard part about writing is that it requires that you have something to say. Whether or not you feel like doing so, you can't very well write unless there are actually thoughts floating along, however bloated, in your thin stream of consciousness.

Sometimes I feel like I have plenty of things to put down on paper. Those occasions rarely coincide with those other times when I find myself in possession of paper, pen, and patience enough to use them.

Unfortunately, I usually have my most prolific moments when I am behind the wheel of an automobile, or scrubbing my testicles in the shower, which, as it turns out, I am pretty persistent about doing. I am meaning to mention this parenthetically. My father always says that it sounds like I am abusing myself in the shower, and in fact, will often take a careful moment to remind me not to scrub too vigorously when guests are near-at-hand. And he has many times wondered out-loud what happens when he is not around to remind me about my showering overtures, about not making them, about not cleaning myself too vigorously-- especially during those peculiar instances when I am the guest in somebody else's shower. What on Earth will your host think of you if he thinks that you are masturbating in his shower? That is my father's rhetorical question.

The problem with getting your moments of inspiration under these conditions is self-evident, I think. It is that preserving your thoughts would involve getting soap on your pencil and paper, or crashing your car in mid-sentence. When I was in school, I tried to get around this later scenario by bringing a tape recorder in my car, but the only thing that I got out of it was a really funny catalogue of all of the church names on Figueroa between Imperial Boulevard and Exposition. There are a lot of them, so many, in fact, that compiling the list required six commutes, separate viewings for each side of the street, and so much double-checking that the list never was, in fact, ever entirely compiled. But the tape must still exist somewhere.

Of course, the bottom line is, if you have nothing to write about when you sit down to write, then you are probably giving yourself too much credit at all other times. It might just be true that you have nothing on your mind whether you are steering your car or scrubbing your testicles, or waiting in line at the supermarket-- wondering if the people who work there can possibly be as stupid as they look. It might just be true that what is going on here is that I am giving myself more credit than I am giving them. In the end, though, I quickly come to realize that I have plenty to say: it just takes me awhile to get started. In closing, I feel like I should add an explanation for why I scrub my balls so vigorously when I get the chance to do so. It is recidivist behavior, really. When I do this, I am reverting back to the time when I really did need to scrub my balls because they really did smell like something awful.

This will require additional explaining. You see, I used to eat a lot of cheese. For instance, when I lived in New York city, at one stretch, I once ate pizza for dinner every night for a whole month. I was sampling the pizza places in and around Gramercy Park, and there were plenty of them to sample. Gramercy Park might sound nice, but Union Square is right there. And then, when we moved to Tribeca, I switched my diet abruptly, from pizza to quesadillas, which still meant that my diet consisted mostly of cheese-- that is the point to take away from this discussion. I ate plenty of cheese in those days, so much cheese that I developed a food alergy.

Before long, my body started reacting violently to cheese. If I ate any significant amount of cheese, I would get zits and pimples and what not. It was like I was still in high school. And also, my balls would smell. And you know what the strange thing is? It is that my balls would smell exactly like a dirty pussy. Now I know this as well as you do: we are now somewhere incredibly far beyond the point where the blog entry went spiralling out of control. It happened long ago. By now it is clear that any subsequent talk will be much too vulgar for anything but the Internet; it's just more fuel for the Women's Temperance Union and whoever else has joined them on the far right; but also, it's true. My balls smelled just like a pussy. Isn't that odd? Wouldn't you expect them to smell like something else-- at least if the factual cause was my excessive cheese consumption? I mean, I could understand it if you wanted to argue that the true cause was otherwise, that it was actually bacteria endemic to the genitals, and that the bacteria would tend to be the same between the legs of both sexes-- especially if both parties are frequently in the mood to commingle fluids. But if I'm right about the cheese being the cause, then we might be on the verge of a real breakthrough here.

There is a logical consequence to this train of thought, a conjecture, a surmise. However bald it appears to be on the surface-- what if it is true? What if pussies smell bad because girls eat too much cheese? I mean, some don't smell bad at all. Some of them even smell good. Maybe the caretakers of those pussies don't eat cheese. Maybe they are Vegan, or lactose intolerant, or blue-haired teetotalers, or maybe they don't eat much cheese for reasons of personal preference. But what about women who drink a lot of milk, or consume too many dairy products in some other form-- lots of butter maybe, or chocolate-- do they suffer the same fate? Just think about the number of women there are out there who are addicted to chocolate. At any rate, that is why I scrub my balls vigorously. And here I want to make this quite clear: It is not because they still smell; they don't. My balls do not smell bad. Not anymore at least, except when I eat cheese. The truth is that I scrub my balls loudly and for a long time because I can't seem to break the habit, which, as you know because I have thoroughly explained it to you already, is a practically harmless holdover from an earlier period of my life when my balls did smell really bad.