For well over six months now, I've been vaporlocked as a writer.  I could get the old engine to turn over and sputter some, but it never would really come to life and fire off like it should.  Some folks call that writer's block, and if that's the proper designation for being unable to come up with anything worth reading, then that's what I've had.  Who knows what happens in a deal like that, but I blame it on mental detachment instead of laziness.  I'm lazy sometimes, but that usually happens when my brain runs out of stimuli.  Sometimes, you know, you've got to prime the pump.

I've been writing now for 25 years, and I've gone through a number of blocks in the past.  Some of the stories I completed last year were started ten or fifteen years ago.  I just got tired of them, pushed them aside, and never found my rhythm again.  That's what it takes for me to be a writer - rhythm.  Once I catch my train of thought, get in a groove, get tapped off, whatever you want to call it, I'm usually there for the long haul.  Getting my beat down, my rhythm going, is the problem sometimes . . . and lately, I've been as as flat as a road-killed frog.

But . . . I discovered moli, and that was a good deal for me because it kept me writing.  I'd never written a blog in my life before this year, but once they started coming, they came in bunches.  A friend once described me as being like an old jalopy - a bitch to crank but hard as hell to turn off after I get hot.  Another guy once said about me, "You know, you don't see much of old Phil, but when you do, you sometimes see too damn much of him."  Yeah, that's me.

For six months now I've been cranking out blogs on a dozen or more profiles, and they've attracted some attention.  I don't know what good is when it comes to hits, or visits to my sites, but I'll go over 7,000 this weekend.  I've corresponded with some really neat people during that time, exchanged nice emails, even had a few phone calls.  And the moli people have been great about using my stuff in The View, and even in Election Central.  I've never really tried to push my blogs, don't put them anywhere except on my moli profiles.  The search engines picked me up, so I'm easy to find now.  All in all, I'm delighted with how my work on moli has turned out.

Spring is just around the corner, and I'm getting restless again.  I can sit and stare at a computer screen all winter, even when I'm not producing much worthwhile, but the warm weather will put an end to that.  I'll head for Ft. Davis, down in the desert mountains of southwest Texs in a few days.  I've got 450 pages of manuscript sitting idle, needs some research, some digging, and I know where to go to find what I need.  I'll hang out with friends, take some pictures, maybe meet a few new people . . . and get back to work on that novel.  Then next week I'll go to Austin, again for more research, more pictures, and then it's off to the border for more work there.  I've got family there, grandkids.

Oh, I'll keep writing a few blogs from time to time . . . but my work on moli is going to slow down a lot.  I need to go from watching this site every day to checking it once a week, maybe twice a week.  When it gets down to it, I'm not really much of a blogger.  I'm a storyteller, a shadetree philosopher, and a political pundit . . . and you can't really do a good job of discussing any of those things when you go stale.  I never thought I'd live to say this, but I'm about to run out of bullshit! 

Look out highway, here I come.

D. Paz, 3/7/08