Moody blues.

          An expert sailor once told me it wasn’t if I’d get seasick, it was when.  Twenty five years later, it hasn’t happened.  Yet. 

            The same applies to writer’s block.  I’ve never had it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  By blocked, I mean what some people describe as dead in the water.  No nothing, for weeks, months or years on end.  It’s true that sometimes I’m supposed to be writing something, and I’m just not in the mood.  So I go write something else.  If I’m in the mood.  If not, I can always find something else to do, like balance my checkbook or scrape paint of an old piece of furniture. 

            If I can’t find a single thing I’m in the mood to do, I’ll check myself into our local psychiatric hospital, which is world-renowned, by the way.  Asked to specify symptoms, I’ll just say “mood disorder.”

            I once visited someone confined to that institution who complained about the lack of meaningful activity to pass the time between group therapy and unappetizing meals. 

            “They mostly want you to color with crayons, only they take the artwork away when you’re done.  I suppose to process through a Rorschach app.”

            I’d be happy with a pen and pad of paper, or at least a paint scraper if I could sneak it by security.   I’d also want to learn something about moods.  I can easily identify good moods and bad, but what’s in the middle?  So-so mood?  Neither here nor there? Is it the absence of any mood?  Is that possible?

If you believe in the Principle of Causality, there has to be reasons for moods, good mood or bad. But this makes me think of the weather.  The reason it’s raining is there’s a lot of moisture in the air, and a change in temperature causes it to condense and fall from the sky.  Science is always ready with a plausible explanation, though I've noticed the scientists are often wrong.

            According to the Pathetic Fallacy, mood and meteorology are not only in synch, ones emotional outlook is actually the cause of climate events outside ones window.  I don’t think this is true, though it might explain London fog, having met more than one dour Englishman. 

            Like meteorologists, many psychologists assert there’s an explanation for every mood state and behavior.  They just haven’t come up with much proof, such as, this just happened to you, so hence your mood.  They pretend they can do this, but they really can’t.

           

        The word mood seems like a second or third string state of mind.  When does a good mood graduate into euphoria, or a bad mood descend into the trough of despair?  These would be useful things to know, since moods seem to have such a profound impact on a person’s ambitions, say to write a novel or spend Saturday night with your disagreeable in-laws.  William Styron once defined depression as, “A wimp of a word for what is in fact is a howling tempest of the mind.”  By these lights, never being in the mood to write would, for me, conjure similar evocations. 

I think the next time I sit down at the keyboard and find myself unmoved to write anything, I might wonder, well how come?  This assumes I haven’t developed a high fever, my neighbors aren’t mowing their lawns, trimming their shrubs, playing volleyball on their front lawn or teaching their children how to shoot a twelve-gauge shotgun.  Though the fact is, there is often no proximate cause for this unwelcomed disposition.  It just happens.  It could be I got out of the wrong side of the bed, though I haven’t tracked this as a triggering mechanism.  If there is a wrong side, I’ll push the bed against the appropriate wall to mitigate future harms.

            There’s nothing else one can do.  Like flights of fancy, mood is an indiscriminate thing with no control stick, no predictor, no harbinger nor recourse.  I could try harder to put a finer point on this, but I just don’t feel like it.