The stimulus for this little piece came from a wonderful 87 year old long – time patient of mine who joked, “Dr. Carson, will you finish your new novel before I’m dead? I want to read it.”

I’ve recently found myself in the gray doldrums of what many call writer’s block. It means I am completely unable to start a page on my next novel chapter. Rather than using the worn out phrase – writer’s block, I am now coining the term “sentenceopenia”, a word that is of course, very similar to osteopenia or neutropenia and medical conditions that are similar, referring in Latin/Greek to “lack of” or “deficiency of”.

It used to be that my inspiration for flying words would occur at the bar, and bar napkins would fall victim to my written word vomit, facilitated by the alcoholic beverage of choice at the moment, as long as the bar napkins furnished are white, and not the popular black that is invading popular Avant – garde bars. (Please refer to some of my previous writings on this hot topic). However, I haven’t been to a bar recently and of course, my trusty liver thanks me for that.

I couldn’t find a cure for my sentenceopenia, so I decided to swim laps today at the local health club. I hate swimming actually, but my road battered knees thank me for it and it provides a good aerobic workout in between weight sessions. But boring.  Booooring.  About all my brain does, it seems, is count the laps and the fast/slow intervals, you know, like going on lap 7 of 8 freestyle with accelerated intervals. That’s important you know, because you don’t want to lose track and mess up.  I learned how to count laps when I was a track runner back when I had good knees.

But this weekend, something different happened. In between the lap counting mantra, I wrote a new chapter in my novel, complete with characters, plot, conflict and action. Done. All the sentences were written, that is, they were written in my communicating dendrites rather than on paper, but you know what I mean.  Hell, if I had a pad of paper on a bench next to my towel by the pool, I would’ve stopped after a 1000 yards and wrote the damn chapter right then and there!  It seemed to make my lap swimming go faster as well because I figured the faster I swam the less likely I would forget the chapter that was just written in my dendrites by lap 40, forcing me to accomplish a super-fast shower, forgetting my socks as I dressed, leaving my hair like Einstein’s and driving fast home to start putting the words to paper.

It worked.

So, I guess that means if I am not at a bar, I need to be lap swimming now to cure my nasty case of sentenceopenia. My skin may flake off from chlorine, but my hope is that I’ll be able to finish this damn thing before I’m dead of course, and hopefully before my patient is dead.

SRC