Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of.

You know, there’s a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own?

I have a gift – it’s the thing that turn up on my work reviews, even when I’ve otherwise completely screwed the pooch, work wise; a knoack for debugging things, for seeing the root cause. Well, THERE’s your problem, and Jaime Hyneman might say. I’m just good at knowing, through some combination of intuition and observation, what makes a system work and thus what’s making it not work.

So I find myself forever in that role; the better I get, the more constant the need.

I don’t mind, you know? It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. It’s what I enjoy. That lightbulb moment, when seemingly un-connected points of data suddenly assemble into a picture, and I can see the point of failure. It’s the tiny highlights in generally drab work days. And more, at home, in real life, when I say, this is the failure point and can apply, or help apply, some solution, it makes me happy.

There are points, though, load exceeds structural resistance and I want to simple give in, let the crushing weight win.

There are the points when I need time away from every single ounce of need, want, issue. No one saying help me or this is broken or can you fix.

This is, of course, the kind of blog entry I usually don’t post. I’ve written it a couple times a year since I started blogging, and rarely does it see the light. Because as much as I don’t want to help, I don’t want any help.

I need a vacation from the universe. And it makes me understand why people find the spike to appealing; let me go away from myself for a bit. Only then there’s another need to manage, and the cycle gets smaller and tighter.

The list of things I need to do gets longer only – never, ever shorter, and the list of what I want to do is almost forgotten under load. I was trying to recall the other day the last time I felt free enough of pressure to cut loose and create, and I cannot recall; it’s lost on the blur if the last year and a half. Even on my last vacation, never did I have a day where I could say, this is my time, forget what other people are doing or want to do.

I feel the edges of a crazy sort of rage at the edges of things. Sadness and anger are lurking at the back of my skull all the time now, and I need someplace to put them.

A good friend asked me the other day if I was ok – really, really ok. And I had to think back a long time to the last moment I felt really ok; moments of time, too soon gone.

I need to be back there, in those fleeting, warm, soft, truly happy moments. And I don’t know how to get back there.

It’s a funny thing how a writer’s block shuts one down.

A friend asked me the other day, ‘when will you write me something’. And I stared at the message and thought, when will I fucking write me something?

Buck made mention in a recent comment of good stuff I’ve been writing and I wondered who’s blog he’s mistaken for mine. Mine, you see, has become a series of place-holder posts, made just so I still have some change on this page, or because I’ve found some funny lolcat or a song that fit my mood particularly well.

I look back and can’t even find the last entry I’d call writing.

Where in the fuck did my creativity go? The worst thing is, most of the time, I don’t even care. I look at my blog editor, ecto, and have nothing. Nothing at all.

I was accused of starting a new, secret blog, but if that’s true, it’s so secret even I can’t find it. If you find it, let me know, ok? Because maybe I left what used to be a decent ability to write over there someplace.

Even writing this is a struggle. The effort seems ill-spent when I know I’m getting nothing.

My collection of writing ideas is growing, and yet, they’re notihng but a line, a concept, a description. I can’t convert to narrative. I can’t find the voice I need.

Last night I was watching Moonlight, the new angel rip-off series about a vampire detective. I wanted to like it, for all the heavy stylistic borrowings; vampire as hard-boiled detective. The show’s got some good actors, and a lot of appeal. Yet the writing was horrible; a grab-bag of hard-boiled cliches linked with clumsy dialog and self-conscious pop-culture references. And I couldn’t stop thinking, god, I could do this so much better. I can do hard-boiled. God knows I’ve read enough of it to know all the hammet/chandler/thomas/macdonald/parker cliches. I can write that stuff in my sleep.

And then I thought, no, I can’t. I can’t even write a blog entry anymore.

Where’d it go? And why don’t I care?