View from the North 40: Not all weeks and columns are created equally

I don’t like writing about the craft of writing, the process of writing, for a variety of reasons — top among them being that I don’t want to make myself look stupid as I pretend to know what I’m doing here.

We’ve all been around those people who read the Reader’s Digest condensed version of an article on nuclear physics and then they hit the lecture circuit of all the dinner parties and casual gatherings of friends and family, expounding on the virtue of nuclear-whatever like they graduated from MIT with the qualifying doctorate — as a 14-year-old child prodigy.

Then I imagine a scene in my head where I say something like “Dude, you’re spelling physics wrong.”

“How can I possibly be spelling incorrectly something I’m saying?” the pontificating speaker would say.

“Oh, I can hear that you’re spelling it with an I instead of a Y.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No, you’re clearly saying phisics instead of physics. See, listen: phisics or physics. Phisics. Physics. Phisics-physics. Everybody say it with me —”

“Phisics. Physics. Phisics physics. Phisicsphysicsphisicsphysics … .”

And then we turn it into a drinking game or a limbo chant or something, anything rather than sit around, glassy-eyed, not listening to some guy talking way out of his whatever.

My point that I was leading to in the first sentence, before I wandered off the track here, is that I am supposed to be attempting to write an alleged humor column, but I haven’t been getting enough stupid sleep and the stupid fire-season smoke gave me stupid bronchitis and my stupid muscles are aching — and now I can’t muster enough stupid enthusiasm to say anything stupid about anything even the stupid news.

My inner voice, the one that says all the words I write in the tone I want to get across, sounds like a cranky, pouting 5-year-old on the verge of a temper tantrum. “Waaaaah! No! I don’t wanna!”

I don’t wanna write about anything in my life right now because it isn’t funny. Again. In desperation, I started searching through the news headlines to see if something would appease the little whiner in my head.

This is what column research sounds like this week:

“Candy Crash: Truck Full Of Sweets Overturns In Highway Road Rage Incident” — What?! Two minutes of video and all I see is two people paying more attention to their inner jerk than their inner safe and prudent driver. Truck gets flipped on its side, aaaaand nothing. No candy. I wanted candy! I want to see it scattered in full color across the pavement. The beer truck crash last year had beer everywhere in a real-life tragicomedy of loss and failure. No candy is stupid.

“Rare translucent lobster caught off Maine coast” — No photo. I wanted a photo of the see-through lobster! And this article is boring! You’re killing me here.

“Man Loses Forearm After Eating Contaminated Raw Seafood” — Too many photos! Uck. Not today. Besides, this just happened, and it’s probably too soon for one-arm jokes.

“Humpback whales spotted feeding in Boston Harbor” — No! The only thing funny here is the word humpback.

A bunny in the U.K. was dressed up like a police dog — No, too cute. (Actually, it was pretty stinking cute.)

80-year-old alligator — Boring. He’s not even old enough for Al Roker to care about.

“Classmates can’t find time capsule buried 30 years ago” — Almost. This article had potential, because they dug and dug, a lot, with no success, but then teacher Sandi Sanders ruined it with her funny quote at the end: “It was an English class. We didn’t know how to measure.”

And now my presence here is pointless.

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We’ll try again next week at http://facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/.