You'd think that in the 5 days since I last blogged that something blog-worthy would have happened. This is particularly strange since I don't seem to have any standards for how interesting or intellectual a topic should be. I've blogged about farting before. Are we to believe that nothing that interesting has happened this week? I think I just have blogger's block.

Someone, maybe it was my high school English teacher, explained how to start writing. He said if you have a topic, like perhaps San Francisco, and you can't figure out what would possibly be interesting to write about it, then think smaller. He suggested, for example, that we could try to start by writing about a particular building in San Francisco instead. If that didn't work, then go even more specific, and focus on a single brick in a specific wall of a particular building.

This spoke to me. The idea of focusing on the details about what made a single brick different from all other bricks seemed much easier than finding something of significance to say about an entire city.

One of my all-time favorite books, The Mezzanine* by Nicholson Baker, took this idea to the absurd. Baker spent the bulk of the novel focusing on tiny details of the protagonist's life. Many pages were dedicated to dissecting topics like shoe-tying, straw usage, and other minutia of everyday life. In all sincerity, I can say that this was fascinating to me. Hearing someone articulate the details of previously mindless bits of my life was illuminating to me. What do you think when you tie your shoes? As it turns out, I find that interesting.

This is probably why 99% of my blog posts are just daily fluff. I can't say many insightful things about politics, but I am the #1 Worldwide Expert on my most recent trip to the grocery store.

So, why the blog post drought? Just lazy, I guess.


*Despite the fact that The Mezzanine is a favorite of mine, I hesitate to recommend it. People near and dear to my heart have found it a complete bore, and I can completely understand why.