I can’t write.

Normally, writing is like eating. I’m always working on the next instance.

But lately, it has been the case of doing what is required and otherwise feeling utterly stymied. I start pieces, I stop, I delete.

The problem is not writer’s block in the conventional sense. It isn’t that I have something to say and can’t figure out how to say it. It is as if I have nothing I feel worth saying. Not so much a humility as a blankness?

Ten theories, none satisfying:

I’m editing. For the first time in my life, my main job has me as an editor. As it turns out, I love editing. I have always liked editing, for I have always shamelessly enjoyed me an urge. But to be tasked now specifically with taking good writing and making it smarter, tighter, livelier – this is dessert.

But editing requires going into the voices of all the others, and I think perhaps it is difficult to hear my voice when I am listening so intently to the rest. (I don’t know, though. Can that be the explanation? Because for so many years I had to edit the newspaper, and still I was able to cough my way into my own voice whenever needed.)

My B-12 level is finally normal. No more spending so much time in liminal oneiric states. And I am pretty sure that is where Pixie, my muse, lives.

But Pixie has also always previously appeared on runs, on the kayak on the river, and even while I wait for my mother to be called in by the podiatrist to have her toenails clipped.

It is true the normalized B-12 is an extraordinary feeling. Like having exactly the right level of caffeination all day long. Yet Pixie was never scared off by a shot of the real stuff.

A.I. I go to a meeting at work, eight of us talk, and five seconds after it ends, the bot presents us with a summary of the meeting that correctly bullets what we discussed and who is supposed to do what in terms of follow-up. A colleague asks A.I. to write a letter that will say x, y,  z and have a particular tone, and out it comes. I spend days when I could be writing wondering if we will still be reading soon, or if, in fact, we will just read each other’s prompts to the bots.

How are we supposed to care about writing now?

No book deal. Despite my agent’s valiant attempts at three or four proposals – I can’t even remember how many we tried – I am not legally obligated to produce a tome by such-and-such a date. I am alarmingly responsive to obligations, and there are always so many of them that, if there is not a book deal, a book does not seem to come.

(That said, I am working on one anyway, and I even have a two-week writing retreat scheduled for July.)

You may wonder, by the way, how it is someone like me can’t get a book deal. But consider the fragile state of the publishing industry, the stupid state of the publishing industry, and the fact that – as my agent so kindly put it – they don’t seem to care about the beauty of prose, and I can’t seem to not care about it. I hate stating the obvious in the obvious way.

The weather is too good. But it can’t be that, because we had a string of absolutely miserable days in the 50s with steady rain. A sodden squirrel came to the front porch and begged nuts off of me not that long ago, looking as if it would never dry out, its tail that of a rat with some rug fringe attached. And still I produced not three paragraphs.   

I have too many ideas. This one may be real. I have notes on too many different things, and it is like having a kitchen with too many kinds of vinegar and salt. There is a paralysis that sets in. One is tempted to order take-out, which in this analogy would be lounging in the bath with the latest issue of Elle Décor.

My writing cottage has been in a state. First no electricity. Then a problem with the heat. Then a massive bug infestation. Now it needs a new window put in to deal with climate change. The contractors started work on it today.

But come on. Though I wrote the last two books there, I have written some of my best work on trains, at coffee shops, and in bed from three to five a.m.

I keep thinking about death. You might think I mean that I am sadly contemplating my own mortality. It’s more like a calculation about how much writing I can get done before I kick off and whether the earth really needs that. Nothing like being an historian to realize you’ll soon be forgotten – which means the reason to write is the pleasure/relief/thrill of writing, and if that is missing, well, then Elle Décor in the bath?

What I want to write about, I can’t. It would invade privacy. There is a David Sideris essay I can’t seem to locate just now in which he writes about his family wanting to kill him for writing about them. As I recall, he ends up teaching his sister’s parrot to say, “I’m sorry,” because it is what he needs to say after all he has done to her and his other relatives.

I try hard not to be an asshole. I have to try very hard, to be honest.

My mother recently praised my writing. I stopped sharing my published writing with my mother many years ago. Part of it was that our politics differ enough that I thought she would hate it. But part of it was that it seemed rather ridiculous, given my level of productivity, to let my mother know every time I published an article, an op-ed, or the like. I did tend to tell her when I published a new book, but even that I didn’t always do.

One of the best things about my mother is that she finds parental expressions of pride distasteful. She takes seriously the idea of pride being a sin, but more than that, she has always felt that expressing pride in your child is taking credit for someone else’s work (the child’s). Your job, as a parent, is to do the work with humility and hope. (I wrote all about this in a book I didn’t tell my mother about.)

As a consequence, I have never felt the need to tell her every time I succeed at something. And the truth is that, sometimes when I have, she’s suggested I’m still not doing well enough. For example, when I called to tell her I received a Guggenheim Fellowship, she asked why I hadn’t gotten a Nobel Prize. No, I am not making this up.

But lately, my mother’s frontal lobe is doing what it will do in your late eighties: it is disintegrating. The consequence is the loss of whatever inhibitions she still had. I would say much more about this, but see the note on privacy, above. What I will say here is that the result has occasionally been that she says something startlingly dear.

A week or so ago I shared with her something I had written a few months earlier, and she thought it quite excellent. She said it ought to have been published in The New Yorker, and that I’m a very fine writer. Given that she was also a professional writer – one who literally read me Strunk & White at the breakfast table when I was a little kid – this is a serious judgment. It has made me more than a little frozen. A mouse that hears the garage door open.

These are, of course, all just theories. If I had to guess, what is in fact going on is that the muse is working on something she isn’t ready to talk to me about yet. I have been here before. It’s why the present state doesn’t trouble me much. Though it does make me wonder, as when the sky turns that greenish-yellow that sometimes portends a tornado.