I have been sick the last few days. It's in my lungs and throat and sinuses. I cough a lot, a wet, rasping cough. It is the same sound as the coughing I overheard on the airplane to Frankfurt in Germany, and again from Frankfurt to Tirana in Albania, and then also on the way back, to Munich, also in Germany, then back to Boston. I remember listening to more than one person on every flight cough and thinking to myself I am bound to get sick. And here I am. Sick.

I'm supposed to write and I don't know what to write about. I am reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It is a book about writing. There are sections that make me certain I have read this before, probably in my twenties, in San Francisco, when I was more seriously exploring the idea of writing for a career.

The title references a story that Anne tells about her brother, who had to write a report about birds. He waited until the day before the paper was due and then, in the living room, a table covered by books about various types of birds, empty notebook open, staring at the blankness of the pages he needed to fill, exclaimed "How am I supposed to write this thing? It's too much!"

Anne's father, who was a writer himself, said simply: Bird by Bird.

One step at a time.

I never really know what to write about. There is the story I have been working on for years of course. Patterns. I've been stuck on it forever. I am wondering if this is because I have to rewrite it from the ground up and I have been afraid to start the process. Part of me wants to write it just to impress Cal, my old high school friend who is a real writer, someone who gets published, someone who writes speeches for others to read, a person who has great power and control over language. He lives in Paris now, a city of cafes and writers. I've been reading a story he's been working on. It's good but uneven. I've wanted to show him I can still write but it's clear to me I can't even write a journal entry anymore.

When I sit down to write, here is what happens: My brain thinks of anything else we could possibly do instead. Have I paid enough attention to my dog? Did I do enough physical therapy for my left shoulder, that I'm rehabbing after getting surgery eight weeks ago? How about regular exercise – was that quarter mile walk around the block with Shelley this morning enough? Probably not. I should think about mowing the lawn then. Or watering the lawn around the new deck, where the dirt is scattered with seed, to try to get the grass to grow before it starts to get genuinely cold. Maybe I should have a smoke, or take a nap, or clean the house. Did I pay all my bills? Did gamestop issue a refund to my paypal account yet?

And so on. A million reasons to not write and I have to come up with reasons to sit here and write instead of getting up and being so-called productive or, simpler and baser, chasing some hedonistic desire like getting a bottle of wine or tracking down where I hit my cigarettes and having a smoke.

Anne discusses these urges and says they're normal but you must, as a writer, simply block time to write, even ten minutes, and then honor it. Take a deep breath. You will hear that voice, begging and pleading with you to get up and do something – anything – else than this. It is too difficult. It is painful.

But if you want to write seriously, you must confront it, find ways to silence it, and write regardless.

I can't really do much of anything right now anyway. The sickness has dictated these terms – my ability to focus is poor and the fatigue comes through, heavy and dampening, urging me to stop writing, to stop doing anything at all really, to stare at a wall instead, or listen to music, or take some of the cannabis gummies stashed away in my home office out of the sight of my wife Penny.

Today, the step I took was writing this. I don't know if there's any value in it. But all of the writing books I have read say the same thing. You must read, and you must write. Writers read, and writers write.

One of the main problems is that I have trouble valuing it. When I do something around the house, Penny notices. When I do something for work, co-workers notice. The writing is invisible. The writing has to be purely for myself.

It feels selfish and wrong in so many ways, to do this thing that seems useless.

Lamott goes to great lengths to describe exactly why it is not useless. It gets the gears moving. It is about motion in the brain, about oiling parts that aren't oiled enough, it is torque and machine force, it is running water through the hoses, it is basic cognitive activity. What happens to a car that you try to start that hasn't been on the road in a year? It might not start at all. The battery could be dead. The tires might be flat. Once it's moving, there may be issues with subsystems: the air conditioning might not work because it needs maintenance.

You have to continually do the work to use the machine or the machine decays.

The machine I used to use to write often feels broken. I have disconnected my drive to write from the machine itself, and this happened years ago. It is difficult to understand why. I blame work, often, because it is demanding, and because when I have a task, I am often not able to let it go – to expel it from my mind – until it is done. It's hard to engage in any other activity that doesn't seem to lead to a resolution of the work problem or task. This part of me – the prioritization of work above writing – has been in place for decades – so long that it has become a cornerstone of my mental function.

I wonder if it is even possible to reconfigure the machinery to allow a different sort of prioritization. And I wonder if I have the will to find out.