I think I am beginning to understand why, when it comes time to write these silly things, I tend to be in somewhat of a down mood.

It is because of my tendency to nap in the afternoon (still working on that habit).

I nap later in the afternoon. I wake up muzzy-headed from dream rich, confusing sleep. I eat supper, which sends my blood sugar upward and makes me even more logy and physically depressed. Then I drag my sorry ass to this here keyboard, and I try to write about something other than my so-called life, but I am in such a state that it is all I can think about.

I am tired, and sort of sleepy, and it is hard to concentrate or focus, and so naturally, the easiest thing for me to write about is whatever happens to be in my head at the moment.

Not that it is quite that simple. These blog entries are not exactly stream of consciousness, and you should all be grateful for that. I have tried to write that way, as a writing exercise, and brother, let me tell you, I would have to at least double my typing speed to even hope to keep up.

My stream of consciousness is both swift and deep, and wide as the Mississippi, so unless I become a world leader in shorthand, I am not gonna make it.

More realistically, the exercise is not to put down every thought but to just keep typing (or whatever) without any thought as to where you are going or what you will type next or (especially) whether it is any good or not. Or even whether it makes any sense. For me, the purpose of the exercise was to prime the pump and get words flowing out of me.

This was, of course, a long time before the Million Words and writing hundreds of words a day and whatnot. That proved to be a far more effective exercise for getting my words flowing. Writing stream of consciousness was a trick I tried in my early 20’s, yo those many year ago.

And while it did not make me a slap bang writer overnight, the results were intriguing, because what started out as largely word salad gobbledygook soon became sentences of a sort, and the sentences became sort of connected to one another, and before too long, I was writing whole long paragraphs without stopping or slowing at all.

And then one night, to my amazement, I produced a whole sixteen couplet poem via this method. I wish I still had it. I don’t even remember what it was about. No doubt it was not that great.

But to think, it all just flowed out of me without my having planned it at all. Apparently, I just had it in me. Or, for a less mystical answer, my mind was perfectly capable of doing the planning and execution without my conscious mind needing to be involved at all.

In fact, could be it works better than way. Some of my best art has come from just enthusiastically slapping things together like a demented Jackson Pollack wannabe. Minimal thought and planning, just jump in and have fun. Like a kid with fingerpaints, just making art for the fun of it, with no thought as to this art having any other purposes than to make them happy right now.

Presumably, as a writer, even if I wrote like that (which I do sometimes, to be honest), I would then have to go back and take what I had enthusiastically banged together and polish it to something like public acceptability. Or at least, editor acceptability.

Anyhow. Back to the sleep thing. So when I write these thing, I am not at my sharpest or perkiest. And while these sessions of entail poking are no doubt therapeutic on a few levels, as I often mope, I am not exactly going to get anywhere in my career like this.

So this is a further argument for not taking naps, at least not in the afternoon. So far, I am not doing so great with that, but I do not expect instant results when I am trying to change a habit of nearly twenty years. I wioll take every day as a fresh battle and do what I can to at least delay the nap, as I did today. Baby steps.

Part of my delaying tactic was to dig out my camcorder and see if I can get it working and hooked up to the computer again. I have been pondering getting into video blogging and making silly videos again. Getting my video setup working again would be the first step towards that.

So far, I have only done the most important but easiest part. Namely, I found the power adapter for it and turned it on and verified that it does, indeed, work.

It had me worried for a little while. I could not find the power cord right away. But then I suddenly remember where I had put it (imagine that!), and we were go. Seems to be working fine.

But like I said, that is the easy bit. The tricky bit will be finding all the cords and connectors and whatnot that I used to use to hook camcorder to computer, and then figure out how the heck I put them all together to make the whole thing work.

It has been so long that I do not even remember exactly where I plugged the thing into the computer. I assume it must have been a USB connection of some sort. At least I hope so, because if not, I do not remember what the hell it might have been.

I will puzzle it out eventually though, and then, who knows. Maybe I will channel all this incessant babble into video blogging, and leave the text production to actual fiction prose and editorials and other potentially salable commodities.

Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?