Assignment: Procrastinate.

I'm a hardcore procrastinator.  This is something I freely admit, as most of those who contextually fuck ourselves over out of sheer habit (and maybe sheer maliase) understand.  It's a process that involves me sitting down, staring at my oversized computer screen blankly, trying to urge myself to actually write.

But I'm too easily distracted.  Hell, since starting this first post, I've gotten up no less than three times (twice at my wife's beck and call, and once to get the little baggie of dried cranberries that I meant to get the other two times I walked out to the kitchen.).  Add to that, I have five tabs on my browser open, each with java-enabled updates (twitter, espn, Huffpost, NYT, gmail) I habitually skip from one to the other as soon as I see an update.

I remember hearing a bunch of times that in order to write well, you need to be isolated away from distractions.  While I believe this to be absolutely true, I am without a cabin in the woods out in the far reaches of northern Maine.  Granted, where I live is essentially a geographic hole in the ground without cell service, but our wifi is strong.  Super strong actually, because I keep our router chained in a closet and feed it nothing but anabolic steroids farmed from Hungarian horse DNA.

True story:  one time I woke up in the middle of the night and found our router out of his closet, bent over the corpse of a rabbit it had caught and dragged into the kitchen, feasting on the poor beast's flesh.  It turned it's blinking-light face towards me, spattered with fresh-kill blood and growled.  I slowly backed into the bedroom and locked the door, making my wife switch sides of the bed so SHE was closer to the bedroom door leading to the kitchen.


But once I get going with whatever I want to write, I usually can't stop.  It becomes like what a meth addict doing his laundry is like; a feverish compulsion to complete the task lest the "bugs" get back under his skin.  Only the bugs in my case are distractions.  It doesn't help when my brain fires off synapses 12 times faster than yours does.  Because I'm super human.  Truth.

What else is hindering my writing ability today is that the java scripting on this hosting site is horrendous.  Everytime I have to hit "enter" to start a new paragraph, ... the cursor just sits there, plaintively blinking at me, as if it doesn't understand the goddamn command to hop down a level.  It just, blinks, almost as if to insult my creative abilities, to hamstring them even.

Ah Christ, it did it again!  Fuck!

Now I'm just being obnoxious.  But it is a huge pain, like a speed bump to my process.  You get your car up to a good clip, like 30mph, and then you pump the brakes and slow the F down to go over this little bump, only to pick speed back up, to slow down again.  Real aggravating.  This is why speed bumps are seldom in more than sets of ... like three or four.

Damnit!  I just spent the last minute futzing around with my iTunes library.  God, concentrate!  ....calm down.

And what's probably the last thing that's causing me to be so lax about my ability to sit down and write something meaningful is that I have literally a stack of stuff to write out:  Honors Contract proposal (only has to be a paragraph long, but something about getting what I want to say in just four or five sentences seems daunting), correspondence from my family on the west coast, other emails that require my attention. 

It's my adult responsibility to get back to these people all within a timely manner, but the simple thought of KNOWING I HAVE to do it makes me want to do it even less.  It's a helluva conundrum.