All Write, Already!

My brain is disobedient.

"Write!" says I.

"Fuck off!" replies brain.

"Doesn't have to be something hard. You don't have to go to all the work of constructing plot and formulating characters. You can just recall some vaguely interesting anecdote from your childhood."

"No," says brain. "Don't wanna."

"Ooooh, here's a fun topic to stimulate you, brain," I say, trying to sound extra enthusiastic, like the hypercaffeinated host of a children's TV show. "Let's write about sleep!"

My brain does not even bother to reply. It just gives me that look, that one six year olds give you when you tell them the trip to the dentist will be fun.

"Think of all the possibilities, brain! You and I are chronic insomniacs, so there's that. There are dreams. You could even write a story. Oh, how about a modern day Rip Van Winkle who sleeps for four years and wakes up to find Dick Cheney has been elected president..."

"Oh, here's an idea," says brain. "How about a psychoanalysis of a man who writes fictional conversations depicting his own brain as an independent and uncooperative third person."

"Uh... doesn't exactly fit the topic."

"We could depict your sanity as slipping into a coma."

Perhaps my ability to write fiction, once an active, if somewhat unreliable, facet of my psyche, has fallen asleep. Perhaps it is comatose. Perhaps it is dead.

Wake up, brain. I need you.