There’s something incredibly cliche about drinking whiskey, staring at a blank page, cigarette in hand, that every writer has done before me, male writer that is. And it seems there is some truth to this ritual. But to explain it seems difficult. I think it has something to do with being pathetic, wanting something that is incredibly hard to achieve, such as love (love that is sustained), and feeling absolutely certain that you are a writer, the page must be filled and that this is the way forward. I think that everyone, every male writer that is, who has experienced this whiskey, smoke and page ritual have been highly unimaginative — about the ways in which they could have spent their evenings not being a complete wanker. They could have eaten an entire block of chocolates and watched a Woody Allen film on absurd love. They could have been useful, fixed a door or read a non-fiction book. They could have gone out to the bar, made a friend, had a  conversation, had fun. Just imagine how many hours have been wasted on this entire cliched ritual. The worst part is that I’m doing it right now and that it seems to be working, words are flowing and the mind is racing. Maybe there is something true about whiskey and writing. Not sure what the cigarettes do, maybe they’re good to bring the writer back to reality. And the blank page is beginning to look less and less blank. The words seem to be filling it up and weighing it down like an anchor getting larger and larger. I guess it’s about here where the mind tends to stop doing its thing. That is, when the mind realises where the mind went and then it stops going all together. I think it’s called self reflection. You can notice it about five to six lines back. It’s where the writing goes from past tense to present tense and eventually it catches up, realises what a waste of time this has all been and pulls the sentence to an end so that I can drink some more whiskey.