Jumping in with both feet

When I was a kid, on one of those fairly rare, warm, Northwest summer days when my family decided on a picnic, I could play for hours in a creek or lake without getting cold.  But if I emerged from the water for a while, dried off in the sun, let myself get warm and drowsy, and then waded back into the water ....

Yikes!

Well, we've all had that experience.  The water seemed to have dropped twenty degrees.  It was literally¹ freezing.  You'd stick in your toe, wade in up to your ankles, then your knees, your hips ... it was excruciating.  Finally, you'd hurl yourself into the Arctic sea -- or be thrown in by disgusted fellow swimmers.  Within a minute or two the water again felt fine.

Rather than pursue this metaphor -- for such it is, rather than simply a tedious recollection -- any further, let me get to the point.

This is my first post in 32 days.  The longest gap between posts, in the almost six years I've been putting out the Northwest Corner.  The longest, I think, even including periods when I've been away from my computer, engaged in foreign travel.  I can't tell you why I haven't been writing.  Nothing much has happened in the past 32 days, it's true, but -- as regular readers are well aware -- lack of viable real world referents has never stopped me from writing before.

No, what puzzles me has been my failure to respond with either delight or outrage to even those insignificant events -- both nationally and in my own small life -- that usually make up my subject matter.  The problem is circular.  When I fail to react viscerally to events, I lack incentive to write.  And when I stop writing, I also stop seeking out and perceiving events worthy of my reaction.

And as the circle continues, I become more and more hesitant to take even that first step, that dabbling of my metaphorical child's toe in the literary waters of quasi-literature.  I find myself awaiting some topic worthy of a Russian novel, not simply one worthy of a short feature on the back page of a shoppers' gazette.

So, today I decided to force the issue.  To jump right into the lake -- to commit self-immersion in one fell swoop.²   Get myself wet and re-acclimated.  And so ... here I am, sputtering, coughing, and shaking the water out of my metaphorically boyish crewcut.

Will our hero thus have overcome his unseemly writer's block, and find himself reinvigorated with the juices of literary production?  As that time-honored closing formula of hack journalism reminds us: "Only time will tell!"

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¹  By "literally," I mean, of course, "figuratively."

²  "Fell swoop"?  Why do we say that?  The expression, like so many others, is from the Bard:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

--Macbeth

The "kite" -- we still use the word -- which did the (in Macbeth, metaphorical) swooping is a species of hunting bird.  "Fell" is an ancient adjective, dating back to the 13th century, which the OED defines as: "fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible."  "Felon" is derived from "fell" in this sense.