Writer’s Block, February, Los Angeles

I walk and I walk and I walk, but the words don’t come. My steps, rhythmic on the sidewalk, are just steps. No matter how far I go, how long I wait, they don’t turn into the magical, percussive beat of language coming to life in my head.

Every morning, I walk, starting out in a different direction each day as if I’m completing a search pattern, covering all the ground where the words might be. I remember catching them before, my trail runners crunching along the gravel next to the canal by the old house, a heron tucked amongst the cattails and concrete and words flowing like the irrigation water released from…where? A reservoir? The river? The words came there too, on the bridge over the Poudre, where I leaned against the railing and watched the current swirl around a fallen log. The language tumbled like the thumpa-thumpa-thump of bicycle tires across the bridge’s wooden slats.

Maybe it’s water I’m missing. I walk.

There’s no water here. Not in the Valley. Certainly not a wild and capricious river, waxing and waning with the seasons. the Tujunga Wash trickles in its concrete straitjacket if it moves at all, isolated from the earth beneath it, discouraged from meandering in its route to the throttled LA River. I have seen that river flowing—not now, but months ago, years ago, and never joyous, never free. It trickles or rushes or marches through its own constructed (constricted) channel like a throng of workers clocking in at a factory.

I walk. The words don’t come.

There is wind here. We do have that, and I think the Santa Ana gusts might carry words, but they are anathema to me. I wake with streaming eyes and an aching head. My gorge rises. I wash down two pills with a cup of coffee and try to sleep again.

Back in Illinois, before the Poudre or the Santa Anas (before, in my personal timeline, the earth’s is too vast to contemplate), the words came as my Chuck Taylors crunched through autumn leaves and squelched on bubbling tarmac and minced on icy sidewalks. Before I owned a computer or an iPhone or a tablet and I wonder if I can blame those things. “5G scares the words away.”

I know better. I knew the internet then, though it glowed green from a terminal in a campus building basement instead of resting, in glorious Technicolor, in my pocket. We’re not in Kansas, anymore. Or Illinois.

I walk. Bougainvillea creeps over a construction site. A crow calls out. Beneath my feet, the sidewalk buckles atop a jutting eucalyptus root. I step over it and keep walking.

I walk and I walk and I walk. Soon, the words will come.