Today is a hollow day.

There are days I feel like I’m striving toward something, striding. Something purposeful, something meaningful. Today is not one of those days.

I suppose it’s all right; I suppose you can’t always be on the march, you can’t always double-time through the shadows with a burning brand smoking up the corridors. But it leaves me hollow and empty and with no motion at all.

I don’t like being motionless. Well, that’s not entirely correct; I like being motionless when it’s a thing I’ve chosen, and serves a purpose. Or even if I didn’t choose it, but I know it leads to something else later on. An enforced sabbatical.

That’s not what this is, though. It’s a permeating fog of dissatisfaction, and I think that’s what I hate most. If something’s not quite right, I like to be able to try to fix it, or think about why leaving it alone is better in the long run. This is just dissociated and rootless agitation at an energy level that’s like the whine of a switched-on cathode ray tube.

Usually, when I hit this point, I find something to do that will cut through that fog. It can be as simple as talking to a friend, or having some ice cream, but I get the sense that this is more closely tied to creative output. Somehow, my actual output and my desired output are not in synch.

Well, okay, they’re never in synch, but there’s a dissonance here that’s more acute and less common than the usual. What’s happening now is a spring-loaded slapdown whenever I sort of think of something I’d like to build or write or map out. I’m in no way at a loss for projects; this has more to do with the squelching of ideas than lack of work.

I spoke before of telling stories as armor. Maybe there’s something in that that I should look more deeply into — a projection of idealized self. Maybe I don’t know what I want to be anymore, or, more worryingly, I feel like I can’t ever live up to the ideal so there’s no point.

Well, regardless, this bit of drabble has made me feel better, and I suppose that’s sort of the point.