My mind is a total blank. I think I might have finally done it. I’ve exhausted everything I’ve had to talk about. There’s nothing left. My brain was a sponge and I wrung it completely dry and now there’s nothing inside. Time travel? Wrote about it. Parallel universes? Check. Honestly, and people who know me can probably back this up, but that’s about all I’ve got. I could write about either topic again, but I think a lot of the originality has already worn off. I make great first impressions. After that, every single impression diminishes by a factor of one-half. That’s why I’m constantly running around trying to meet new people, but I never call any of them back, ever. Because I know it’s not going to be as fulfilling of an encounter, for them. So I’m thinking of everyone else here.

I was going to write about not being able to think about anything to write about, but I think that I already did that. And then when I went back to make sure, I think that I already did it twice actually. So I’m definitely not going to do it again.

Sometimes when my mind’s drawing a total blank I’ll pick up my computer and go somewhere else. Usually I just write in the kitchen, but that can get mind-numbingly dull after a while. One time I read this article about a guy who turned his treadmill into a desk, so he was constantly walking while he wrote. I don’t have a treadmill, so I just put my computer up somewhere high, so at least I’d be standing up. But it was a little too high. I couldn’t figure out where to rest my wrists. So I went down to the baseball stadium and applied for a job selling beer and soda. And they hired me on the spot because, like I said, I’m the best at first impressions. They gave me the outfit and that contraption that hangs around your shoulders so all of the beers are standing right in front of you, propped up right against your stomach. Then I went home and mailed in my two weeks’ notice. They told me not to bother coming in, seeing as how I hadn’t even really started yet. Hopefully I can still use them as a reference, because I was nothing but professional.

So I took that beer-selling thing and I put my computer on it, and I started walking around in circles in my living room, typing while I walked. It was like the treadmill desk, but much cheaper. Like I didn’t have to go out and buy a treadmill. I thought it was a genius move. Unfortunately, I wasted all of that time going to the baseball stadium and filling out application forms when I should have been writing, or at least sitting there thinking of stuff to write about. And that thought got me all anxious and nervous, like maybe I wasted so much time that it’s going to take me forever to get back to where I once was. And as I got nervous and anxious I started pacing around in that circle with my laptop in front of me even faster. Faster and faster. And I didn’t know it, but I had left the computer plugged in. And my computer came with one of those magnetic chargers, so that way if it gets yanked out it will just easily detach without doing any serious damage. But I thought it was a little insulting of the computer company to not trust me with such an expensive machine. What am I a little kid? Plus, they should want me to break it, because then I’ll have to go back to buy a new computer. So I superglued the charger right to the charging port. But, like I said, I was pacing around faster and faster and I was so worried, so riddled with these negative ideas running through my head, these ideas screaming at me, telling me, “Hey Rob! You might as well stick with the beer-selling job, because you blew it! You’ll never be a writer! You’ll never think of anything interesting to write about ever again! Bwahahahaha!” And while I was pacing, I don’t even know how this happened, but the power chord started wrapping itself around my legs. It was loose at first, but every lap I made around the living room made it just a little bit tighter. And this is probably my own fault, because I went out and bought an unnecessarily long computer charger, like it had to be like twenty or thirty or forty feet long, because one time I was watching a TV show on my computer, and the computer couldn’t reach to the table where I wanted to watch it on, and I’ll never rest a laptop on my lap, because I can just feel the heat of the computer irradiating my insides, so I moved the table just close enough to where it just barely made it. But the computer chord was so tight that it didn’t even touch the floor, it just made a taut straight line right to the wall outlet. And then my dog, who was sitting perfectly still, decided to have this manic burst of energy and started bounding through my place, and I knew he was eventually going to run right into the chord and send the whole computer crashing to the floor. So I just said, forget it, I don’t need to watch this TV show, and I put the computer away before any damage was done. The next day I got up and went to the Home Depot and bought some industrial strength superglue remover. I removed the pathetic short chord, bought this ridiculously oversized chord, superglued that to the computer, and then watched TV on my laptop for like a whole week straight.

I thought I had it all figured out. But here I was pacing around my living room as thirty or forty feet of computer chord wrapped itself around my legs. All of the sudden I took a step and something gave. I looked down and my legs were wrapped completely together, like a mummy, and I was falling. I went to reach for something to grab onto, to steady myself, but the closest thing was my computer, and that was already anchored to me, so it did nothing to stop my fall. And the computer went flying. And all of my writing, gone. Wasted. I always turn auto-backup off, because I hate the idea of having a computer automatically save every word that I write. What if I want something deleted? What if I get so famous someday that, generations from now, there are entire departments at each university dedicated solely to studying my every word? And what if they study my works so thoroughly, and they realize that, they did it, they completely unraveled and deconstructed everything that I had to say? But it’s not enough. They need more. What will future generations study? So they decide to go after my old computers and look through the archives of my autosave folders to see if the hard drives held onto snippets of writing that I deemed unworthy of saving. And they’ll look through them and be completely disgusted. They’ll realize that they had put me and my writing on this artificial pedestal, that they had created this ideal me, this perfect writer incapable of even writing one bad sentence, of even misspelling a single word, and then they’ll see this rubbish and the whole illusion will come crashing down. And the very next generation will hate me, despise me for ruining these once respected departments at all of these fine colleges and universities.

But then, when I came crashing down because I was too cheap to buy a real treadmill-desk, I remembered that this whole exercise came from the fact that I couldn’t think of anything to write about in the first place, and so it didn’t matter if I destroyed that computer, because there wasn’t anything there to begin with. I didn’t have anything to say that day. Sometimes I just can’t think of anything. My mind’s just totally empty. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.