That heading is not some clever shtick. It’s the literal truth. I am writing a blog post with nothing to say.
I just love writing, playing with words and ideas, it’s an itch I have to scratch. So here I am scratching it, even without actually having anything to say. I just picked up a pen and paper with no plan, to see what would come.
And now I’ve already managed six sentences. Tempting to title this, “My Best Blog Post Ever.”
Of course there is sooo much to write about. Trump, Trump, Trump, Putin and Ukraine, Middle East, religion, AI, culture wars, Trump, consciousness and the self, China, death, Trump. Et cetera. But I’ve been there, done that. Endlessly.
So complex are human life and the world, endless might the topics indeed seem. Yet even for such a polymath, a Renaissance man, like me, they’re actually finite.
Notice I wrote “me” where many people would say “myself.” They’d be wrong, at least per traditional grammar. But language evolves. Oh, and I’ve written before about this too: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/me-myself-and-i/
Well, I’m struggling here to gin up content for this essay whose point is writing about nothing. Nineteen sentences now, so I guess I’m succeeding, sort of.
Actually, nothingness itself is a topic. Philosophers have wrestled with what it really means, especially in the context of how the universe came to be; why there is something rather than nothing. But that too I’ve already written about: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/why-does-the-world-exist/
Now maybe there’s something rather than nothing in this blog post. If you call this something.
Say, did I tell you the one where a guy walks into a bar every night and orders three drinks? Yeah: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/paul-auster-travels-in-the-scriptorium-the-prisoner-of-time-and-a-bar-joke/
Or the one where the guy walks into a doctor’s office with a frog on his head? Yes, that one too: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2022/09/19/my-birthday-gift-a-marriage-culture/
Or my favorite, the masochist in the bar who meets a sadist? Yup: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/im-not-making-this-up-dave-barrys-greatest-hits/
So, what does one do, writing a disquisition with nothing to say?
This.
And now that I’ve scratched my itch, I can move along to wasting time in other ways. And so, dear reader, can you.