Well.  It’s Tuesday morning now, the second day of the work week.  Yippee.

I don’t have any idea what to write.  It’s not at all unusual for me not to have an idea what to write about, but that’s not really what I mean right now, though it is related.  I just feel a near-complete lack of motivation even to try to find something interesting to “say”.

Of course, it’s possible that you all think that I never find anything interesting to write or say at any time, and that’s fair enough.  Interest is basically in the mind of the beholder, anyway.  I’m well used to people not being interested in things in which I’m interested.  It’s not quite true to say, as Poe wrote in his poem, that “all I loved, I loved alone,” but it certainly feels that way quite a lot of the time.

I think maybe I’ll read a couple of Edgar Allen Poe poems and maybe some others as my next few videos.  With Halloween coming up, it might be good, next week, to do a reading of The Raven.  I can still do it from memory, though I occasionally have to stop and fuddle around to find all the words to the verse that ends with, “but whose velvet, violet lining she shall press, ah, nevermore.”

I enjoy reciting those poems, as far as it goes, and it might, therefore, be a good thing to make a video about it, so to speak.  I don’t know how much, or if, people liked either of my last few videos.  I think I may be the only one who actually clicked the thumbs up for either video.  That wouldn’t surprise me, nor would I necessarily think it inappropriate.  No one has a right for their work to be liked, though they have a right to be able to produce it and share it if they are able.  But you cannot demand fans, you can only try to entice them by creating work that someone, somewhere out there might like.

Yes, I think perhaps I will do a few videos of me reading poems.  Perhaps the first one will be a two-poem video, in which I’ll read The Second Coming by Yeats, and Alone, by Poe, which I quoted above.  Actually, I won’t read them, I’ll recite them; I know them both from memory, since they are both short.  They are also two of my favorite poems.  I don’t know if anyone really reads any “classic” poems anymore, even in school, except of course to the extent that songs and raps can be considered poetry.  Some of them certainly can, without reservation (though many of them, not so much*).

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature, taking his work as poetry; and who could deny that Bohemian Rhapsody, or much of the album The Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall, or a substantial proportion of the Beatles’ songs are legitimate poetry even without the music?  And there are many raps which, whether you like the subject matter or not, are clearly poems of a particular sort.

Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe anticipated modern hip-hop when he mentioned that he heard the sound of “someone gently rapping, rapping at [his] chamber door**.”  It would be fun to hear some top-tier hip-hop artist doing his or her version of the full poem The Raven with a beat behind it.  For Halloween, you know?  Snoop?  Your birthday is coming up***; you could do it to celebrate.  It could be brilliant.  The Simpsons did it (albeit in abridged form) in an early “Treehouse of Horrors” episode.  If Homer Simpson can recite The Raven for comedic effect, surely Snoop could achieve real ominous intensity.

Okay, maybe it’s not a great idea.  But it’s an idea, and it might be fun.

With that, I think I’m about out of ideas for the day; possibly I’m out of ideas for good.  Possibly I’ve been out of ideas for many years now, but I’m too low on ideas to be able to recognize the fact.  It may even be the case that I’ve never had an idea in my life.  How would one know?  And—let’s be honest—would it even matter?  The universe is the way it is, the experience is what it is, there is some underlying reality, whatever its nature ultimately is, and I was not consulted when it began, if it began.  Neither were you, most likely.

*And this includes some very big hits; I won’t get started.

**Ha ha.

***I know this because Snoop, Viggo Mortensen, and I are triplets from separate mothers in separate years.