Authors Electric

Another Ground Hog Day and I'm spinning my wheels. Same rut; different project. They say that rewriting is part of the process, but I feel like Bill Murray's clueless curmudgeon midway through his trial by repetition. Eighty thousand polished and re-polished words and now I'm redoing the opening - always the opening, the grabber, the launch. I feel like I'm weaving a Persian rug with my fingernails. I'm forever climbing an M.C. Escher staircase. I'm at the stage of get-on-with-it-already. And it's Trump vs. Biden for the White House again this year -- deja vu soaked in Trump-aversion shared by a majority of my frustrated countrymen. Deja vu turns into horror when we recognize how closely Trump's MAGA fascist path parallels that of Hitler. Two years on and an increasingly demented Trump seems undeterred by consequences of his bloody, failed January 6 insurrection. Similarly, the Führer and his Nazis continued their rise to power undeterred by failure of t...

I might still be trapped in a Groundhog Day loop as you read this post on February 3, but at least I will have gotten out a message. Lately, I keep rewriting the same passages over and over, only to find myself back at the beginning like a monk on an M.C. Escher staircase . My inamorata says I'm probably rushing the process. By her – and any other sane person's – reckoning, I've only been at this particular work for a few months, but I'm convinced it has been years, maybe eons. She reminds me that I've complained about being looped before. Maybe it's a nice way to tell me I'm loopy, but it kind of makes my point. “It happens with my paintings too,” she says. “You'll break through. You always do.” I'm not so sure. You never know what's going to work until it does. The late Harold Ramis who produced and directed Groundhog Day, was all over the place about how many years Phil Connors, the hapless cynical weatherman played by Bill M...