The most fruitful era of this blog, as I suppose many of you long-timers would agree, was around 2001, when I would take Amtrak from Berkeley to Santa Clara and back every day. Two hours of watching the world go by, armed with an ipod and a laptop -- but no network -- made for the most inspirational environment. 600 words each way every day was a breeze, a torrent. Stream of consciousness joining the slipstream of the train racing through urbania.

Now it's four years later and living close to work (and being pretty well-connected to the net at all times) has done more to staunch the creative flow than anything else. Yesterday I was at a friend's housewarming and I had the opportunity to see a lot of friends I haven't been in contact with in a long time. Blogging friends mostly, I was much closer to their circle when I'd attend SXSW; when I'd regularly make weird sites that would grace the pages of slashdot and BoingBoing; when I'd... you know... blog.

I talked about my block with Kevin Smokler, whose book sits on my nightstand even at this moment. He told me that David Mammet writes nearly two plays a week. Most of them are crap and David knows it, but rather than craft gold at every sitting Mammet chooses to write quickly, only panning the text for gold after the generation is complete.

In my heart I've always known this. While working on the redesign (and I have been, for the last several days) I took a peek in the database at all the entries that I've written and never posted, either because they weren't finished, or were waiting for some other bit of info and were eventually forgotten. Now I have experiences and have stories to share, but they always come about when I'm doing something else, and by the time I should blog it, I have other things to do. There's never that time to breathe, to acknowledge that I'm in the place and time reserved for creating personal content.

So how did I manage to write even this much, with all the distraction and pressures all around? My DSL connection is down, and there's nothing else I can do.

I suspect Ali or Ammy.