Lacking Inspiration

I realize I haven't really written anything worth reading in a long time. My inspiration comes in flashes and I guess I haven't been struck by lightning in a while.

Lately my life fits into a tidy little box. There are no messy edges, no carelessness.

There's nothing to write about.

And yet here I am still struggling to put words to my humdrum. Passion to my plaintive. I don't know what moves me to do this. I don't know why my fingers always find the keys.

I am inspired by a lot of things.

Today it was a little girl in red mittens. A sign in a living room window. The wandering man outside the Damen St. Liquor Store, pushing a heaving cart of bulging garbage bags.

I know its unwise of me to envy his messy edges, but I do anyway.

The thing is my inspiration is fleeting. It never sticks. I subsist in it for as long as I can, backstroking happily through waves of insight and revelation and then nothing. Poof. Like a dream, it's gone.

I wake to find myself staring at that homeless man's face, feeling nothing as the woman in the car behind me begins honking her horn.

And all at once, I'm just a girl in a car at a stop sign.

Thoreau said "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" and that doesn't sound so bad.

I'm going to go off the record with this post. Meaning, I've turned off all the RSS feeds to any of my hundred other online outlets that would allow anyone else to peek around.

Let's get intimate, Blogger. It's just you. And me.

I'm depressingly bored. Or, boringly depressed. Either way you put it, I'm not leaping out of bed in the morning. I want to inhabit someone else's life. Take over their size sevens. I've always wanted to have size seven feet.

I'm ready to give in.

Give me the blue house and white picket fence once and for all. Give me the dog and the laundry and the groceries. Let me be satisfied with a life of percolating black coffee every morning, two sugars, one cream, kissing my husband goodbye, saying "Love you, babe" and believing that is all I've ever wanted out of life.

Let me be proud of small accomplishments, a well-hedged lawn, a bed made every morning and turned down every night. No dents in the car, no cracks in my proverbial sidewalk.

I surrender to the expected, to the routine. To the punch of the timeclock every day at the same time. To render ideas with no implementation. To be ineffective but remain jovial. Day in. Day out.

I don't want to be me anymore. It's too hard.

I want to be happy with the circumstances I'm given and never question anything. I want to settle and for once not regret it. I want to be a regular, not a small, not a large. I want to be the safe choice. Please let me live without ever having to know frustration or unmet potential. I don't want to know how things could have been. I want to concede to things I can't change, to accept futures that don't make waves, to live contentedly, concentrating only on being the best ordinary me I can be.

I don't want to grow up and have to be something.

And Blogger, I want this now.

I just want to be overlooked. I'm done with expecting anything other than the reliably pedestrian life that would never, ever, ever include this immutable heartbreak that just won't let me for one god damned day wake up without it.

I'm ready.