Worded out.

That's what I am. I have spent most of the day writing an article that should have taken me, at worst, maybe three hours. That's what happens when the focus of the piece has to be shifted slightly in mid-stream to satisfy the client. Turned out a quick, superficial rewrite wouldn't do it -- at least to me -- so I ended up cutting away everything I wrote last night and starting fresh.

I should write yet another piece tonight. No one has thrown any curves at me on this one; it's short and is really little more than a typing exercise.

But I don't wanna do it.

The pressure of what's due tomorrow and over the next ten days, coupled with the usual array of annoyances, has brought me to the stage in which I simply don't want to even think about the subject I'm paid to write about, much less commit words to print.

There are lots of things I'd like to think and write about but they don't make me any money. And right now, money is more vital to me than happiness.

Hell, I'm not entirely sure what happiness is. It's been a long damn time, and the last instance came at a terrible price.

That said, I'm going to do something different tomorrow. Rather than sit here pecking out words as my frustration mounts, I'm going to spend the day attending, for the first time in close to a decade, to my avocation.

There's no money in it -- just a free ferry ride to and from Catalina Island, with a lunch thrown in -- but the satisfaction of doing something I can do well, a combination of hands and ears that can only be done right or wrong, with no gray areas to drive me crazy, may calm me down a bit.

The only bad part is that this is one of perhaps five things I'd rather be doing than writing new versions of the same old stuff over and over. At the end of the day, the knowledge that this is a one-shot deal might weigh on my mind a bit.

But I'll take the chance.

Anything is better than fighting the word-demons.