Blue Scream of Jeff: January 2015

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Much to say about nothing…

One of the hardest things to do in writing this blog is coming up with interesting and/or humorous topics to discuss each month.

Usually I try to shine a light on something obscure or share my weird take on things going on in the worlds of technology or geekdom. But this month I’ve got nothing.

Zilch.

Nada.

Bupkis.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

I’ve got a lot of ideas running around my head – like why passwords are passé, what a world without privacy would be like (and would we really notice?) and why today’s geeks don’t seem to have as vivid imaginations as my generation did. (That’s right all you youngsters! Get off my lawn!)

So then, why isn’t this month’s post about one of those ideas?

Well, because at the moment, all they are, are just ideas. Ideas that would take me all of about a paragraph to write.

And that’s not enough to fill this space.

Not, at least, for someone who subscribes to the George RR Martin school of story telling, where “short” stories range about 500 pages.

Now any good journalist will tell you that a well-written article, column or essay should be concise and to the point. They’d tell you to avoid what one of my curmudgeonly J-school professor’s called “The Great American Nose Bleed.” But I think even he would have had a problem with a feature column that was only one or two short paragraphs long.

And yes, before you ask, I was a young and crusading Clark Kent-type before being lured over to what many of my newsroom friends refer to as the “dark side.”

That’s an idea for a column too, I guess, and maybe someday I’ll write about how I was seduced away from being a journalist by the power of the tech. But for now the only thing I can think of to say about it that is, that this “dark side” really did have “cookies.”

I wouldn’t call what’s happening to me a case of writer’s block. Ideas are still popping into my head at their usual pace. It’s just that none of them have caught my imagination they way they usually do, nor have any taken off and blossomed into something more concrete.

I blame the winter for this.

Flowers don’t blossom in the winter and concrete doesn’t cure correctly in the cold, so it makes sense I’d have trouble writing when I hate the cold.

In fact, when it gets cold here in the Northeast, my motivation to do anything other than curl up under a blanket (or with the dog, if a blanket isn’t handy) and watch TV and sleep drops faster than the mercury in the thermometer outside my window.

For the past month, I’ve been tired, cold and grumpy. Kinda like a bear, who has the right idea about the winter. At the first sign of cold weather, they head for a nice comfy cave, set the alarm clock for spring and sleep in until it’s warmer outside.

Unfortunately, I don’t have that option, though I wouldn’t mind trying to hibernate until spring.

I bet you I could.

It would be nice to finally catch up on my sleep and when I awoke, I’m sure I’d be really motivated by all the strange and new ideas I got during that extended period of dreaming.

Even if that wasn’t the case, I’d at least have a great story about how I slept all winter to tell you about in my next post.