I can't seem to tap into energy for anything other than working. I shoot the wad at work, as they say, and after that I have nothing. I come home on Friday nights limp and numb. I watch a movie on TV or, worse, I browse the Web. These days I try to remember to turn on the radio, too, but often I don't feel like listening to anything. I like the silence, the lack of stimuli.

Even reading feels too arduous!

Some people pass the time like this year after year and call it a life, but I feel like I'm wasting time, of course. You've heard it all before, the same old litany of the same old struggle. So pernicious it is, it seems it must be in part genetically determined. The imaginative mind strains against its own architecture.

Again, for some people, time isn't palpable. You work, you rest. You work. For them, life isn't a lit fuse. I don't know what it is for them, if not that, but these people—I say, many more people than I would expect—seem not to be alarmed. This isn't lost on me.

It might be the difference between not having any particular expectation of what you will do with your life and having one, even if the focus of that expectation isn't clearly defined. Maybe it is defined as broadly as "Working for other people is for the birds," in which case the expectation is simply knowing what it is you don't want.

Anyway, I'm fine with all this fruitless but lucrative work—at least for now, while the economy is in the shitter and while I still feel like I need to catch up for all those years of underemployment—as long as I can also exist in a way that feels true to me.

Unfortunately, I don't feel like I get to be in touch with myself very often. Like I said, I come home Friday nights totally spent. I sleep late Saturday, and for the rest of the weekend all that my being wants to do is absorb pleasant things—coffee, brunch, and other indolences.

I know you're thinking that sounds nice enough. What's to complain about?

It's that, the re-accumulation of energy takes the whole fucking weekend. I'm not kidding. Like clockwork, six o'clock on Sunday rolls around and suddenly I feel like diving into personal projects. Six o'clock. On Sunday. Six hours from midnight of Monday, is all the time I have for any one of about 5 or 6 projects and sundry household tasks.

Crazy.

So each week, having failed to re-accumulate enough energy to feed the muses, I plot some tactic for the week, a half-baked promise truth be told, that will allow me to work on my projects during the week.

An exercise in futility, I tell you. Futility.

But the most frightening thing is that over time it's become more and more difficult to reconnect even when I have the time. I isolate myself, give myself a swath of hours on the prime real estate of a Saturday night, and, still, nothing. I'm devoid of generation.

I know it's still there, the font, but I can't get to it in the short periods between work and rest. To reach it, I need to disconnect completely, for like a week.

You know how often that happens.

Not often enough, I know.

Thus, we arrive at tactic number #57, an old exercise made new again: a journal entry a day for an entire month.

Can I do it? I've never done it before. What makes this time different?

It's not. I've never really tried to create a journal entry every day.

Why now?

Well, I want the practice of making something I care about every day. This journal is not one of the projects I'm working on, but it is a very similar activity that satisfies the need to complete something. I suppose the quasi-public nature of the journal is a key part of the similarity. Posting an entry is like releasing something to the public, in however small proportion. This is different from writing in a paper journal no one sees. In fact, I've been journalling on paper and it's not helping. I'm still stuck.

So here goes. Wish me luck!