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There's been a lot going on in the news lately, a lot of really weird stuff, some really crazy things. I know because I watch the news all the time, sometimes. That is to say, I watch the news whenever I can't find an old rerun of Andy of Mayberry or M.A.S.H. or something running on whatever television station it is that runs old TV shows such as those. In the past couple of months, alone, we've seen some pretty strange stuff. We've seen Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton all go to hell in a hand basket--some of them, more than once. We've seen some members of Congress try to shut down funding for the War in Iraq while swearing they're not trying to shut down funding for the War in Iraq. We've seen advocates for tighter immigration control vote against a recent immigration control bill that would have...well, I'm not sure what it |
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would have done, and perhaps they weren't all that sure, either. We've seen young college-age girls disappear by the handful. We've seen young children get abducted and then rescued. We've seen mothers torture their children and fathers rape the neighbor's kids. We've seen War in the Middle East escalate to frightening proportions. We've seen Jimmy Carter call President Bush the worst president in history and then take it all back ("King's X...only kidding!!") We've seen, in one of the most bizarre cases of the pot calling the kettle black in U.S. media history, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather calling current CBS news anchor Katie Couric a "tart." We've seen tenured college professors threatened with expulsion and members of Congress convicted of crimes still drawing hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal retirement funds a year. We've seen someone warned not to travel after being diagnosed with a rare case of resistant tuberculosis board a plane for Canada and cross back into the United States without being questioned. We've seen a former recording studio mogul worth zillions of bucks sitting like a drugged-out zombie in a courtroom where he faces murder charges. We've seen a district attorney who once prosecuted several Duke La Crosse team members prosecuted, himself. We've seen a New Orleans cop accused of beating an innocent elderly black man commit suicide. We've seen recalls of pet food and toothpaste, of automobiles and canned biscuits. We've seen radio shock jocks fired by the fistful. We've seen Iran thumbing its nose at the rest of the world over its nuclear development program and its worldwide support of Islamic terrorists. We've seen Rosie O'Donnell "quit" her television show, The View, after belittling one of her own co-stars on the air. We've seen several dozen U.S. senators and congressmen with relatives on the dole to the tune of millions of dollars a year of taxpayer money--and who knows how much more in "favors" and "special-interest" votes. Why, we've even seen Larry Birkhead showing off his newly won prize, daughter Dannielynn, in a nationally televised interview. So why, with all of this really strange stuff going on all around us, why is it that writers--particularly new writers--still come up to me and complain that they just can't think of anything to write about? Usually, whenever that happens, I just nod my head sympathetically and mutter something under my breath, such as, "Yeah, it's a pretty dull world, all right," and walk away. The point of all this rhetoric is that, if you're a writer who can't find anything exciting to write about, you're doing something wrong. You're failing to get the message. You're just not hitting on all six cylinders. And, if that's the case, maybe...just maybe...it's time you took some serious action. Such as running yourself into the local garage for a tune-up. If nothing else does the trick, that might work. In the meantime... Smoke if you got ‘em.
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