1688 words about writer’s block, fascia, and a quixotry about ants

I have nothing to say.

What should I do?

My fingers are above the keys. I want to write. I am not trying to avoid writing. I am trying to write.

I am not heading to the kitchen for more snacks, reading yet another article about the Republican National Convention, or sitting in the backyard reading The New York Times Review of Books.

I am sitting on a bench, and I am trying to write.

What can I possibly say? I have no ideas that live up to the noble silence of writing.

There is a brown ant on my white shirt.

This is true, so at least I have achieved truth.

But it’s not a story.

So let’s suppose that while ants appear to be individual beings, they are actually all just one enormous creature whose fascia we cannot see. That would explain a great deal.

My white shirt, where the ant has just crossed, has a large stain on it. Soy sauce.

Although technically, it’s not soy sauce. It’s “not-soy” soy sauce. It’s actually made from pea protein.

This is because soy triggers histamine reactions, and I am — I have found out — highly histamine intolerant. I also run short on diamine oxidase (DAO), the enzyme that breaks down histamines. So I am doubly cursed. I essentially live in a permanent state of allergic reaction.

At least, I did, until I found out about histamine intolerance and DAO. I am less reactive now, because I eat far fewer things that either contain histamine or trigger it. I shouldn’t actually consume the non-soy soy sauce either, because it’s fermented.

And yes, fermented things are not good for me. This will come as no surprise to anyone who had to endure me during the worst days of my drinking.

Mingus at the Showplace is one of my favorite poems. It was written by one of my favorite poets, William Matthews. These are the opening lines:

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature.

I think I thought of songwriting similarly. You digested alcohol and shat songs. In that construct, alcohol is a proxy for experience, because it was the portal into experience.

I have always been tall, and I was always old for my grade in school, so I stood out and stuck out. And because we moved around a lot when I was growing up, I was often “the new kid.”

When we moved to Italy, I went to an English-speaking school, but the students were all Italian. They were mostly the children of diplomats and educators whose parents wanted them to get an English education.

I was led into the classroom, put up at the front, and the teacher told them I was new in class that day. One boy put up his hand and asked, “Is he going to stay here?” It was very welcoming. I had to take a bus to school every day, and every day, the bus had to stop so one boy could get off and throw up. Italian children back then did not use backpacks. They had briefcases. I still remember going to the store and seeing the vast row of new backpacks running down the aisle. It was magical. I felt like Paddington. Italian schoolchildren were also expected to have their own copy of the Collins dictionary in their briefcase. My copy had a black and yellow cover. I was very proud of myself.

Despite having a briefcase and my own copy of the Collins dictionary, I stood out and stuck out. It was not possible to be a wallflower. Fortunately, Italian children in that era all wanted to be strikers, so they stuck me in goal at recess. Being an American kid, I had grown up using my hands playing American football and baseball, so I was a natural goalkeeper. I was suddenly rather popular.

Goalkeepers are a strange bunch. Highly visible, but also highly separate.

This was an early lesson for me. If you can’t hide, do the opposite. I began to aggressively not hide.

This was why I liked to drink. Drinking helped me aggressively not hide.

These days, I’ve gone back to mostly hiding. I like it better that way. It’s much easier on the body to close the blinds than it is to down a fifth of rye. I like to think I’m one of those curmudgeonly old people who peers through the blinds every time they hear a human voice on the street and mutters something grumpy-sounding.

I was wearing this same white shirt on this year’s Fourth of July, albeit at that point, it was without the non-soy soy sauce stain. I did not know then that I’d be sitting here today thinking about this stain on my shirt, or that I’d even have a stain on my shirt.

This is a funny thing about things. We see them now, but we don’t know what happens next.

Sometimes, I’ll watch a recording of a baseball game the day after it was played. I find it fascinating that I’m watching people play who don’t know how the game is going to turn out. I look at Mike Yastrzemski, and I can see that he doesn’t know he’s going to hit a walk-off in the bottom of the 9th inning and improbably win the game. How funny that I know and he doesn’t.

This is a bit like what writing is like.

I’m like Yaz. I don’t know if I’m going to write the poem that wins the game. Will I? I’d like to. But I have to wait and see.

I forgot all about the ant. It’s not here now. Or if it is, I can’t see it. I don’t know very much about ants. How long does an ant live? I could, of course, look this up very quickly. But I’m not going to. I’m going to continue sitting here as a don’t-know-how-long-ants-live kind of person.

I read that paragraph back, and started thinking about sight. Because I couldn’t see the ant, I immediately presumed that it wasn’t there. That’s ridiculous. What if I was blind?

That’s the thing about our senses. We sight by them. Pun intended. Because I can’t hear something, does that mean there is no sound? Because I can’t taste something, does that mean there is no flavor?

This has something to do with objective versus subjective truth. Is there really such a thing as an objective truth, and how could we possibly know or understand it, when our senses provide us with inherently subjective information?

Subjective truth is fleeting. Perhaps this is the root of the desire to write. Somehow we know that this moment will last only as long as a single frame of a movie reel. Our life is an endless processing of single frames that pass by so fast that we experience a sensation of continuity. We think of ourselves as having solidity. And while we know we’re not permanent in the sense of actually being immortal, we feel a kind of permanence for as long as our mortal lives last. But it’s a farce. So we write, to preserve what happened at each frame.

Former US President Jimmy Carter purportedly said that the things you can’t see that are important are “justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love.”

So much for sight.

I have a confession. I gave in and looked up ants.

As I suppose I should have expected, it’s complicated, and has to do primarily with caste. A queen can live for decades. Drones are at the other extreme. They fertilize eggs and die. A matter of weeks. Worker ants are the most plentiful. They can sometimes live for one or two years. Sometimes even longer.

Most of this I kind of knew. But I don’t think I knew about “reproductive alates.” According to Terminix:

“Ants that fly or have wings are called “alates” and are sexually mature ants. They are “alternate reproductives” created by the queen and fed by the worker ants in a colony.”

I don’t know if that helps to support or refute the theory of all ants actually just being one creature.

We flake off “dead skin,” don’t we? Perhaps these seemingly individual ants are actually just akin to bits of skin that are flaked off the whole.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, “Ants are found almost everywhere on the planet.” And according to the National Science Federation, ants have been around for almost 170 million years. That means they emerged during the Jurassic period, when huge dinosaurs roamed the earth. So what if this massive ant creature that is pretty much almost as big as the earth itself, actually evolved to kind of stabilize or hold the earth in place while these big dinosaurs pounded around on it? Maybe this ant creature is actually the earth’s fascia.

This is what happens when you don’t have anything to write about.

I’m grateful the brown ant walked across my non-soy soy sauce-stained shirt.

That line isn’t quite as useful as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which uses every letter of the alphabet. My sentence only uses 18: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, r, s, t, w.

It’s missing: j, p, q, u, v, x, y, z.

And here’s where things get interesting. Do you know what word uses all those letters I was missing? There isn’t one. But when I asked ChatGPT to find one, it gave me this:

Quixotry.

That’s an incorrect answer, but it’s a great answer anyhow, because I not only discovered a great new word, it’s a perfect word for this idea about ants.

According to Wiktionary, a quixotry is “a wild, visionary idea, an eccentric notion or act; a quixotism.”

My theory about ants as the earth’s fascia is a quixotry.

And this is what happens when you don’t have anything to write about.