When The Funny Goes Away

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Listen: Previously, I’ve mentioned that writers tend to have a high body count. I’ll tell you why – you make your profession trying to tell people things that are interesting, things that will make them laugh or, if worst comes to worst, think, but then sometimes, for no conceivable reason whatsoever, you can’t do that anymore. You run out of ideas. As a person who makes a living on ideas, it’s really scary when they stop coming. It’s frustrating. And to middle aged alcoholics with multiple divorces, it turns into depression. It’s like if the goose that lays golden eggs suddenly starts laying regular eggs: Sure, eggs are delicious, but they don’t pay the rent unless your landlord has a bizarre obsession with omelets.

It’s one thing when you write yourself into a corner, as I have successfully done in both of my novels-in-progress and my screenplay, but it’s a whole different ballpark when you’re writing a twice-weekly column about anything that strikes your gosh darn fancy and you still can’t find a subject write 700-1000 words about. It makes you start to doubt your merits as a writer, and when writing is, besides playing 80s power ballads on a football field with 200 other musicians, your absolute favorite thing, you start to wonder if maybe this is God’s way of telling you that you’d be better off as a vending machine technician or a prison guard. Like impotence, I’m sure this happens to lots of guys, but also like impotence, it sucks to be like lots of guys.

Impotence isn’t an issue for me; however, writer’s block definitely is. It’s been smooth sailing for the past month or so, but there were a few weeks in February where writing this blog was an excruciating and terrifying process, because I know before any of my readers when an entry is no good. I can tell about half a paragraph in, usually, and on a couple occasions inspiration has saved me and suddenly I’m back On again and I can revise things and make it funny, but in most cases the deadline hits and I have to give my audience – and thanks, by the way, for being my audience – a product that I know is sub-par. You know when you’ve been looking forward to watching the new Scrubs all week, and then, when the day arrives, it turns out they scripted about five minutes of new dialogue and the rest is just a clip show? Don’t you hate that? When I put up a blog that clearly isn’t up to my standards, I feel like the guy who invented the clip show. That guy eats puppies, I’m sure.

Criticism is tough. People will tell me when my blog isn’t that good – offhand like, just in passing, “Not your best, this last one”, and of course, I’ve known that from minute one, but it sucks to hear that, because I like pretending that maybe you all have such bad taste that you’ll think my writer’s block updates are solid gold. No, it’s cool – by all means, keep criticizing when you don’t like what you see, because that’s the only way for me to enjoy it when I’m On. Failure is what makes success so awesome. For skiers, there’s trees to not crash into. For writers, there’s updates that clearly aren’t as good as previous ones. This was a failure, but hopefully I’ll have a success come Wednesday.

Oh, yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it, you didn’t know the Hair Guy could do serious stuff too, did you? You’ve been a great and loyal audience thus far and I think I owe it to you all to level with you when I can’t think of anything to write about, rather than cobble together some crap from my notebook or force an attempt at humor. I figure it’s a lot more worth your while, since tonight I can’t provide the humor you show up for, to at least give you something genuine and from the heart, even if it doesn’t make eloquent use of the word “wang.” Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of writing was, “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” So I suppose that’s what my new guarantee is going to be, even though you’re not all strangers – nothing you find here will waste your time. Of course, seeing as I watched all four seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, I probably don’t have a very good idea of what a waste of time is.

Truman Capps is a happy person who lives a rich and interesting life – he is most certainly not depressed, nor abusing drugs, nor dating a girl with visible tattoos, and he will call you later today, Mom.