It’s January, that cold gray endless month that follows the hey, everybody! glitz and tinsel of December.

Let’s pause for a moment while I get fully into my cold, gray, endless mood…

Okay, I’m there.

So–how are all those New Year’s Resolutions workin’ for you? Not so much? Me either.

And what do you do when you’re in a funk, when it’s January for real–or just in your mind?

Here’s what I do: I write myself out of it. Yes, truly. Just at that moment when my brain is sludge and all I really want to do is vege out in front of the TV, I make myself write. I would like to tell you that I keep an earthenware jar, an old Indian artifact, on my desk in which I collect writing prompts as and when I see them. But that would be a lie. Instead, I grope into the recesses of my brain and come up with a prompt or two that’s lurking there for God knows what reason. Like:

1. “The last time I saw Paris….” This is a good one that enables a tale of when I really did see Paris, or why I’ve never gotten to Paris, or Carrie’s fountain scene in Sex & the City, or…..
2. Pick up the last thing I was reading and pull out the fifth sentence: Theodore B. Olson’s Newsweek article, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” The fifth sentence is, “Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage.” That would enable me to set off on any number of rants, in a variety of genres. I could do a disquisition on what it actually means to be a conservative and why so many of them seem so mean-spirited. Or I could rethink my opinion of Olson–he’s the guy that successfully argued Bush v Gore–and try to understand how that act, which seemed to me heinous, fit within his understanding of the Constitution. Or I could–you get the point, don’t you?

See, now I’m in a much better mood. I stopped thinking about all the stuff that put me in a January funk. And, hey! I produced some writing, which is always a good thing. But most of all, it let me tap into the sheer pleasure of writing, of working with ideas and with words, which is, after all, the real reason I do it in the first place.