How easy is it to not write? To not meet the daily clip? To not find a reason to produce?

I have been working out with kettlebells for a while but I injured myself. Tendinitis in the wrist and shoulder. Wearing a brace.

Distraction. Roadblocks. Life. David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” is a speech about the reality of life. Passed the fanfare of those seminal moments, the majority of our lives are spent in the drudgery of the mundane. There will always be lines to wait in, bills to pay, and those million little inconveniences that keep piling up.

Something always comes up. There is always an excuse not to do something (like as something as intensive as write a book). There will always be those annoying miniature dramas: a stained shirt, the cold tile in the bathroom in the morning before work, someone says something that cuts to your ego and it wouldn’t have made any difference but today, of all days, it hurts the most.

We’re always bargaining these imagined, idealized futures with the very real, the very infuriating, present. We stumble over what we would have said in that one situation, we wish we could be a few pounds lighter, and that thing we did from 5th grade continues to haunt us (though it is entirely insignificant).

These lanky, decaying bodies carry a mind in a constant state of flux, hoping, needing, that tomorrow will be better; in those feeble attempts to improve and make do on those promises we tell ourselves, we fumble and stutter and crash.

And then we try again tomorrow, because, that’s all we can do.