Sound Absent Voice or Voice Absent Sound?

I've plenty to say. But I'm not sure how any of it is to be said, how any of it can be transmitted.

Oh yes, I have been writing everything down. I've meditated on the variety of ways one might enter any number of topics. I've certainly been tapping away at the keys as well, churning out a number of clever phrases and intricate arguments. There's been no lack of effort, of wiping sweat from my steaming forehead in the cool of a moonless midnight.

Yes, I've been inspired. While my days are increasingly rosy, I'm still quite agitated by all sorts of phenomena -- too many to count, which is essentially a net change of zero. Of course, if we must use numbers, I'm sure any one of you could name at least four things you know would send me off on a tangent.

Nonetheless, I've found it very difficult to actually press "Publish" as regards any of them. Even after laboring over a given piece for hours, I seem to be favoring "Delete".

I rarely even use "Save".

Worst of all, I'm not entirely sure why.

Am I somehow too happy to publish? Well I am happy, but not so blissful that I can't gripe. Here I am, after all, griping about being gripeless. And I was at least as happy before as well, even when freely expressing my negativity on this blog. So it can't be happiness.

Am I too sad, too negative? No. It's not so much a crisis of existence as a difficulty with expression. And even if I were extremely depressed, I've never been too sad to express it with verbosity.

Am I burnt out? The holidays definitely wore me out. Then again, I still find a great deal of excitement in all sorts of areas of life, some established, some new. I've been cooking up a storm, trying my hand at some more advanced French and Italian cuisine with relative success. I cooked an awesome filet mignon with a fennel/pinot noir reduction and moved on to a spicy Sicilian sausage soup. I've picked up the guitar again, this time with an ear towards incorporating pounding funk and mellow blues into my existing toolkit of Metali-Slayer riffage. I had a very successful first semester in Grad School. Work is fine. And like I said, I have been writing. So in all I still appear to be growing as a person. Can't be the traditional sort of plateau.

Or am I just floundering through my first few attempts at making sense visa vi actual people instead of abstract argumentation? Was my reliance on the crutch of punditry masking a genuine lack of perspective?

Perhaps. Maybe I made a mistake in abandoning the Op-Ed vehicle; the mistake being that I failed to prepare a landing before taking the leap. In doing so I've inadvertently crossed from essay writing to the realm of art, or more difficult still, a combination of the two which somewhat resembles philosophy.

These are tasks for which I am apparently, sadly, ill suited at present. As this post reveals, while I have no problem ascribing a number of words to a given subject, I have a hard time nailing anything down.

I seem capable of uttering nothing but such confessions.