Question: What is more terrifying and unsettling to endure: the movie The Exorcist or having an acute case of “writer’s block” and staring at a blank Microsoft Word document for 3-4 days? Honestly, I’d call it a toss-up between the two.

A couple Halloweens ago I watched The Exorcist again, and again it didn’t fail to scare the crap out of me. If I could’ve watched parts of it through my fingers, I would’ve. The special effects weren’t much by today’s standards, but the 50-ish year-old movie holds up great and really did the trick.

Equally disturbing is a bad case of “writer’s block”, even without the spinning head and projectile vomiting. When I use that term, it makes it sound like I consider myself to be a “writer” or something. That ain’t true. To me, a writer wrote at least a book or two or maybe a couple magazine articles. I thought about trying to do that one time for about 5 minutes, I quickly abandoned that idea when I realized I couldn’t come up with a story or a topic to talk about that would fill more than 2 pages. If I’m giving myself a fair shake though, I guess that technically you could say I’m a writer since 95% of what I have to say these days comes in the form of the written word (text messages, email, this blog, etc.).

I had decided that for this post I was gonna talk about one of my favorite free, over-the-air (OTA) TV shows that I watch all the time – Jeopardy!  (Question: I never know when you’re supposed to italicize or put “quotes” around book, song, movie and show titles. The internet was kinda vague on that. What’s the rule? Any ideas?) But any time I’d get an idea about what I could talk about, I wasn’t on my computer. When I did get on to where I could jot the idea down, the idea had already escaped me, and I was left with nothing. I have a pretty severe case of CRS (“Can’t Remember Shit”) syndrome, and it’s been flaring up a lot lately. Very annoying. As a result, I’ve been paying closer attention to those commercials for Prevagen, the “brain function improvement supplement” (aka, “Snake Oil”) more than I’d care to admit. I’m a long way away from pulling the trigger on that, though.  

I had a “feelbad” Friday evening. I wanna talk about it openly for two reasons: 1) It might clear my conscience some and help me feel less guilty. 2) It gives me an excuse to talk about what I said, and once my clever remark is put out there, I’m sure it will quickly catch fire and probably sweep the entire nation in a matter of days. The backstory: We had just gotten home from my dad’s and Jen flipped on the TV. It was still on Channel 4 and once again, they had cut into their regularly scheduled programming to blast into whatever show you were just getting into with their “*** BREAKING NEWS *** Weather Alert Storm Watch! ” coverage. The next thing you know, you’re stuck watching some reporter you never heard of, who’s standing in front of a gas station 3 counties over with a blown down sign, talking about rain and saying something like, ‘we could expect to see wind gusts of up to 32 mph’, for the next 45 minutes. And they were just getting to Final Jeopardy!!

Anyway, Jen had the audacity to keep it on that channel (she’s interested in weather coverage and stuff like that. Me? Not so much.) for like 2 whole minutes before switching over to FanDuel and putting the Cardinals game on. I felt another stroke coming on! In my defense – two things: 1) The local weather people seem to cry ‘Wolf!’ a lot; they do this whenever there is a stiff breeze, or it gets cloudy – and then they tell that you definitely need to grab your annoying weather radio and head to the basement if this horrible drizzling keeps up. 2) The Cardinals have been on a tear lately and I was feeling impatient and anxious to start watching them annihilate the Kansas City Royals on Friday night. So naturally, I made some smart-alecky comment – jokingly, of course – about the wall-to-wall weather coverage. I said, ‘WTFC?’ (‘Who The F-word Cares?’). Pretty clever, right? Yeah, in retrospect, I didn’t think so either. I felt like I’d invented a new phrase, and I had to beat feet to the patent office before someone beat me to it. In reality though, young people less than half my age have probably been saying that for a couple years, so maybe I should’ve just calmed down.

So, here’s the feelbad part: Come to find out the next day, that really was a big-time storm that blew through St. Louis. Several people in North City lost their lives in the storm and it caused over a billion dollars in property damage or loss. I felt bad for joking/complaining about all the weather coverage the night before. From now on, I need to cut people like Steve Templeton and Angela what’s-her-face some slack, even if they do get too worked up over Spring weather.

I wanna give Dr. Zazulia a shout-out for telling me about Claude AI last week. It’s a website where you ask a question about any topic you can think of, then it returns a whole ream of information in essay form. It’s like Googling something, except Google is taking steroids. It’s a little creepy. For example, I said to it: ‘Tell me about the game show Jeopardy! in the voice of the writer Dave Barry.’, and I’ll be damned if what it returned didn’t sound just like him! She was right when she said it was addictive. I “went down the rabbit hole” that afternoon and stayed there quite a while.

I know I said I wasn’t gonna complain about my petty Pet Peeves anymore, but I can’t help myself. This is definitely maybe the last time – I promise. You know the phrase “going down a rabbit hole”? How many times a day do you hear that phrase? It seems like I hear it at least 5 times daily and it bugs me. While I’m at it, the practice of speaking or writing with every third word having “quotes” around it also bugs me. I, myself, am guilty of committing these transgressions fairly often so they haven’t risen to the level of “Super Annoying” yet.


*** BREAKING NEWS (again) ***
Speaking of rabbits –
Update on ‘Operation: Bunny-B-Gon’:

I need to walk back my comments I made previously about our ‘mostly ineffective rabbit trap’. It appears that it isn’t as useless as I thought. We caught 2, count ‘em 2, (very embarrassed) little bunnies today. Jen wanted to try out her new Rabbit Stew recipe, but I convinced her to just release them out front.
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Public Service Announcement:

Cool, relatively new website = Justwatch.com.  
I use this one all the time.
I heard Guy Phillips on the radio this morning, I don’t really care for him much (HUGE ego) but he made a good point. He said something like, ‘Trying to figure out which streaming service has the show you wanna watch on its platform is practically a full-time job.’
That’s true but it doesn’t have to be that way – If you know of a movie or show you’d like to see but don’t know which streaming platform is showing it, you can search for it here and it points you in the right direction.
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Another PSA: “Joy Of My Life”

If you’re like me, you constantly have an earworm song playing in your head all day long. For some reason, I’ve had the song “Joy Of My Life” (written and performed by John Fogerty of CCR fame) stuck on “repeat” in my head for the last two days. Chris Stapleton also has a version. They’re both good, but I like the original better.
Good song – you should check it out.
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I don’t know how interesting it was to read this post, but I’ve sure enjoyed writing it. More fun, less challenge. Maybe I’ve stumbled upon my niche? I hope my head completely empties itself of blog post ideas sometime soon and I can do this again.


Danke fürs Leson!  

– Jim