Sometimes, though, no amount of automation is ever going to actually help the writing come.

The title of this post lies.

My resistance is to the lack of perfection. I don’t write because I can’t have everything easily published the way I want it already.

Today I started playing Rowland S. Howard’s Teenage Snuff Film on my stereo. It’s an album that means a lot to me and I thought I’d write a bit about it.

To write about it without publishing a photo didn’t seem like enough. I take photos of records when I play them. I always enjoyed the physicality of music on vinyl, and a photograph is part of the way I express that enjoyment. Here’s a photo of Teenage Snuff Film from the first time I played this new edition.

But there’s a lot I need to do if I want to start including images in my blog posts so that they’re instantly and always displayed appropriately for the device or medium you’re viewing this via.

This is a tiny barrier to overcome. I could do the work to automate responsive inclusion of images. I could (as with this post) avoid the image altogether or work around it through links to the image in another context.

The facts are less important than the reality of my excuses. They are, on the one hand, not literal excuses. Their reasoning is unacceptable and too many alternative options exist. I cannot be excused for these reasons. They are more correctly written as excuses. It is an acceptable term but invalidated through interrogation.

Viewing the other hand, they are the manifestation (vocalisation? verbalisation?) of a more visceral resistance to act. The resistance itself is mental but I feel it in my whole body. I physically cannot progress. My pancreas and liver pull me away from the keyboard and my trachea leads me to the couch so that my lungs will not be fooled into thinking there is any real danger and therefore be overworked.

All the organs conspire to step away from the potential imperfections and distract myself with another episode of The Bob Newhart Show: appreciating someone else’s good work rather than investing in my own.