After a rare day of contentment and focus, when work was eminently possible and writing was easy, you slipped back into the usual fog. Tiredness, vagueness, wandering. No chance of finding a place to begin work. Only confinement to the office stops the infinite dispersal of attention. Even then, it is dispersed across the internet – message boards and celebrity gossip pages.
The struggle: to wrest a day of work from the fog. A day of work – one hour of writing takes five hours of surfing and wandering, of reading newspapers and grazing. Temptation to drink coffee – but you’ll pay tomorrow when you are more tired still, with dark rings under the eyes. Or to drink – but there are too many hours between now and bedtime to lose in the haze. Suspicion: the fog is a result of gluten. So cut out gluten. Or dairy products. Cut out those. Or of drinking the night before. Well, stop that, too. Or a lack of exercise. Well, go to the gym.
Still stranded before the tasks ahead, you make excuses: too much administration. Secretly, you find it liberating; it allows you to say to yourself after another unproductive day: I've done something. Filled out some forms. Filed a report. Prepare a document in officalese. Now you can really begin work. Alas, you’ve finished all the administration. What else is there for you to do. Write a post for the blog instead. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete before the month is done and a review and then a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that, too.