The author sits with immeasurable discontent.  He is unable to write. He has ideas, sure, but they are all rubbish. He has typed a bit already, but nothing with any substance has appeared on the screen. None of it has any meaning. The story is utterly pointless.

He sips his whiskey sour. Maybe a little liquid confidence will help by dissolving any creative apprehensions, allowing him to remove the barrier between his mind and fingers and to write only the most unfettered truth. Or maybe he’ll just get drunk.

He stares mindlessly at the ceiling fan as it spins. Resolved to continue its insignificant task without hesitation, it spins. A propeller without a purpose. A blurry vortex of mediocrity.

Hypnotized by its insignificance, he picks out one of the blades and follows its path. His head starts to spin and the fan comes into focus.

He looks at what he has written so far. Just awful. A lobotomized bulldog could come up with something more clever. There’s no hook, no conflict and no discernible plotline.

What a hack.

“Perhaps a change of scenery will help,” he lies to himself.

He picks up his laptop and shuffles his skinny legs toward the bathroom to sit. He pulls his belt strap out of the loop and gives a yank to undo it. For that brief moment it is overly constricting, strangling his waist.  He jerks it off of his pants and chucks it in the trash bin, aggravated that a better belt has yet to be invented.

He gazes at the seat, tears a sheet of toilet paper three squares long.  He sits. The porcelain clings coldly to his naked thighs like a perverted magnet.

He turns his attention forward to gawk at the screen. The familiar feeling of angst fills his mind. Despite all technological advancements that have come about, writing still has to be done manually. Electric cars, water-powered jetpacks and digital gooch-massagers that do your taxes for you, yet not a single automated creative writing program.

“What am I even trying to do? This won’t even be read. No one has the attention span to process anything past a nine-word tweet about their dietary tapeworm anyway. What’s the point…” he laments.

He stands up, cranes his neck forward and looks at his reflection rippling across the toilet bowl. He flushes. A blurry vortex of mediocrity.

He drives to the trendy local coffee shop. He takes his laptop out of the backseat. He takes a seat. A granola girl approaches the counter. Her back is a tattoo resume of Eastern mysticism. “Look at this cool symbol—aren’t I enlightened?” it reads.

A mohawk with a barista underneath chortles at her about his new contact lenses.

They change color based on mood.

The girl orders a chai java mocha chocalato.

The author looks at the screen. Awful. Just awful.  If only he could crumble it up and throw it out the window into oncoming traffic, sacrificing a bumper, an air bag, and a fire hydrant just to achieve resolution after having created such cognitive waste. This despicable disgrace to short stories everywhere has to be desecrated, defaced, defiled and debased. It has to be printed and read, a thousand times only to be ridiculed and hurled in the trash.

Unless…

Suddenly it hits him like an angry hippopotamus.

“What if I wrote a story about the writer’s struggle with trying to come up with an idea for a story? It could be genius.”

The barista smirks at him.

Elated with finally coming up with something, he sits down and begins to write, “The author sits with immeasurable discontent.”