unmovable blocks

I think I need another Arabica Night because I haven't attempted to write anything in a couple weeks and an optional deadline is looming at the end of the month. I've been reading and trying to get inspired, haunted by the literary ghosts/muses of Pekar, Balzac, Austen, and Joyce, by the flowers growing through the weeds of the house next door with the twisted yellow siding ripped by wind and burned by arson, melted into clanking curlicues of vinyl. If it had been metal, it would have been long gone by now.

I'm not as dead-crackerific as my creative compadre, but I struggle to evoke worlds on paper and on the laptop. I started writing on here to attempt to process musings about city and life and people, to keep writing even if I don't always have much to say that makes sense or is of any remote interest to the world outside of yours truly, learning how to see better, learning this whole life thing in general.

I really don't have much patience with either the chroniclers of Bright Young Things on either coast or the wannabe Bukowskis or the Jonathan Franzens rehashing the tired trope of literary DesperateHousewifery of outer-ring suburbia. It's boring. Hearing about New York and California all the time gets old, but those who dare to write about the Midwest or the Rust Belt post-1950 don't bring it to life for me for the most part.

I don't want to read crime novels or lurid tales of Scumbags Doing Scumbag Things to Each Other or Depressed Self-Absorbed TwentySomethings Just Like The Author, or First World White Girl Problems or Remember The Good Old Days That Never Existed. I don't want utter bleakness or sentimentality, and I know there has to be a middle ground here somewhere, it's just hard to find.

I know I will never be as good as those whose strings of words I love, but I'm hoping that I can string together the literary equivalent of beach glass, thrift store beads, and rock crystal into something interesting since I doubt it will be priceless.