I’ve been finding it hard to write lately.

It’s not the infamous “writer’s block.” The problem is that the only thing I want to write about is all the you-know-what coming from you-know-where.

And isn’t there enough of that sort of thing available pretty much everywhere? Every day? Every second?

I find myself belatedly having some sympathy for the mouth-breathers who squealed like maladjusted brakes whenever my columns would veer off the course laid out in the race bible and careen into the real world. Which, if we’re being brutally honest here, was pretty much all the time.

“Stick to cycling!” they’d wail.

“Everything is political!” I’d bark.

Now I’m just a blogger and don’t have to meet a regular deadline or wrestle with nervous editors, penny-pinching publishers, and illiterate critics.

Too harsh? Hey, I read the letters.

“Go back to waxing your chain, Spanky,” I’d grumble. “Leave writing to the pros.”

These days I write for free, because I like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is likewise free, to fuck off.

Still, I’m not entirely sociopathic. I have you hardcores, my small, deeply disturbed audience, to consider. And I don’t want every single brain-dump here to be of the rancid, greasy, orange variety. There are only so many different ways to say ‘BOHICA!'”

Thing is, to write about anything else feels vaguely criminal. Borderline treasonous. Anyone with a voice, however small, should be sounding off like they have a pair.

What’s a poor mad dog to do?

Well, you may imagine my delight when I stumbled across another scribbler in similar straits. Chuck Wendig is a published author — like, of actual books, an’ shit — and he has a new one due out April 29, “The Staircase in the Woods.”

I first noticed him when The New York Times included “Staircase” in a roundup of 24 new works of fiction to read. Then his name came up again over at Daring Fireball, the free-ranging blog by John Gruber, who promoted this “crackerjack essay” Wendig had written while trying to write about other stuff and promote the new book and basically just live his fucking life.

It’s titled “What It Feels Like, Right Now.” Here’s a sample:

Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Top-shelf stuff here, folks. Rage and comedy, despair and hope, the whole ball of wax. Writing as an escape and an act of resistance. Inspirational.

In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately ordered up his new book from my favorite local bookstore, Page 1 Books.

Shit, I’d have given him the $32.29 just for the essay.