anxiousI've been up for two hours so I guess any minute now I should start working. I don't know what is so hard about starting and I'm never sure just where my resistance lies but once I get going it is always fine. I guess there was a long time in which things weren't fine and sitting down to stare at a blank document, unable to think of one word to write, was unpleasant to sufficient degree as to make the whole prospect less inviting.
there are other things too just briefly for instance certain obsessions of mine sometimes get hooked on the reading or the writing and that can be very annoying but it hasn't happened in a long long time. like over a year. still the memory is enough to make me want to have nothing to do with philosophy or theology or literary criticism or anything.
the bind is that I'm completely addicted to these very things. I wish I knew that there were no risks in thinking things through. there is always risk of course as you might run up against something irresistible that yet tears your world apart. there have been times when I thought this was happening but they generally turned out just to be the little fascists in my head and once I tuned them out everything fell back into place. of course the hard part often was the tuning them out. it used to take days. sometimes weeks.
now it takes about fifteen minutes, but their mere appearance is somewhat traumatic and can throw me for a whole day.
so you see there are things that make it more difficult than it used to be, although I used to find writing painful in a similar way just not as acutely.
