A lifeless pigeon flattened on the pavement. It’s dead eye stares up at me. Waves of gray cloud smothering the sun announce that November is next and all the leaves are brown.

A clock ticking.

Water dripping.

Spiders cob-webbing my head.

Another day of desperation hovers over me. I’m blocked! I’m tapping my fingers on a table in the Cup O’ Joe Java Café -- a sparsely occupied opiate den for coffeeheads. I open up my Inspiron (What a name!) laptop that has replaced years of spiral notebooks now stuff haphazardly in boxes stacked head high in spare closets around the house. I stare for a moment at the bodies of spacemen floating across the screen saver wondering why I do this. Who am I kidding? What’s the point? Haven’t I had enough? Then suddenly I overhear someone ten years younger than me talking to her associates about a screenplay she has created and would her friend so and so like to participate in her efforts to produce it.

Augggggggggghhhhhhh! They’re everywhere. Everyone is an artist, a writer, a producer, a poet, a playwright, or a scribbler of one sort or another.

That’s it. I quit. I give up. They’re younger. They’re smarter. They’ve got friends and networks of friends connecting them to the boundless energies of the Universal Creative Force. And they’ve got financial resources and patrons. (Mommies and Daddies.) They’ve got MFAs and support groups. And diplomas! They didn’t drop out of school. They didn’t buck the system. The Wide Wide World of Literature is theirs. I’ll … I’ll just go … and … and I’ll become … what?

I’m stuck. Even though I don’t do it well and hate to take the courses and read the how-to-books that to would make me better, I’m a writer. Because I write. Almost every day. And unfortunately I come from the old school of a bygone era when to be a writer meant that you, old frostbitten fool, had to take the path less traveled because “You’ll never make a dime at it.” Mother said. “Do you know how few people get published?” Father said. “Poetry! Maybe you should try writing greeting cards, and if you succeed at that, try the church bulletin’s gossip column, and if that goes well, scribble out a couple how-to-books, and then, and only then, deceive yourself into thinking that maybe you’ll get your novel published -- once you’ve finished it. But for now, get yourself a good job selling gadgets or clothing or some real author’s creations.”

What do these young people around me know that I don’t know? Who do they know? If I were the “real” deal I’d be interviewing them right now finding out? Never! I’d look like an old coot has-been and they’d pity me. Maybe I should write an article about them? How is it that they are so energetic and I so disillusioned?

Augggggggggggahhhhh!

Of all the obstacles to my daily enjoyment of writing, comparing myself to others ranks the worst. I forget that however small the successes are I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve been a low paid freelance writer, free of a day job, for thirty years. I’ve pieced together a modest livelihood from engagements, scribbles, and bullet blurbs, and I’ve done it without too much compromise to the commercial forces that turn truth and art into fashion and flash commodities. So why do I get defeated, down for the count, on a daily basis? And where’s the avenue out?

I’m in the midst of it (the block) right now.

And what I do is write. I write myself out of it. And when I get writing, when it starts to flow again, I know that along with this lonely occupation go perpetual self-doubts and distortions. Who am I to think that someone wants to read or hear what I have to say? How important to the giant scheme of things are my ideas? Why should I clutter up the mass mind waves with my babblings?

Answer: Because this is what I do. It’s my gift and curse, my destiny, and the discontent comes from expecting that your destiny and true worth are determined by the arbitrary measurements of our currently materially motivated world, by having your face on a magazine cover, or your titles on the best seller’s list – titles that so many times appear spine-up in the bargain book slush troughs only weeks after topping the top ten.

It’s corny, but the pure heart objective of this art we all struggle with is to fling a chance at capturing something in words that someone needs to hear or read, that will effect change and give someone hope, that will energize one person who will then energize another passing on what needs to be passed on to yet another person, to yet another generation.

For Goethe sake, half the time we don’t remember who wrote the latest most wonderful cover we just read anyway. “The author was uh …uh … Oprah something.” Do the names Homer, Cervantes, and Cummings really matter, or do the windmills and heroes, the rose red setting suns, and the ‘dooms of love’ far outweigh the who’s who’es and their reputations?

Okay, there’s a lot of BS in that paragraph, in this whole exercise, but it has kept me going for a couple hours and now the café is nearly empty. I’m almost done for the day. Two hundreds words pecked out and six cups of coffee consumed. A stab at the unfinished play, a paragraph or two added to the suspense novel, final revisions to three poems, and this last paragraph about my journey around the block.

We lucky unlucky ones, those of us who have no choice, write because no other avenue seems to satisfy our wanderings and longings. No other method is able to puzzle out our purpose. No other secret love so completely stimulates our soul with struggle, spirit, and joy. And when the doubts come draped in their robes of distortion and despair, remember the means are the ends, to be a writer is to write.