We have a lot of fun, you and I. We exchange witty emails and jab at one another on Facebook. We share our hopes, our dreams and occasional bacterial infections. We have this connection, you and I, that pivots on a pair of weekly newspaper columns and it works well. But the relationship is in peril. Divorce may be imminent or at least a break-up text message. I’ll tell you why it’s so.

For me, every Monday starts the same way. I jump out of bed with a song on my lips. After a quick breakfast of curds and whey, I’m off to split wood and build orphanages. I spend a little time with my a capella group and then it’s straight to pilates. My buttocks are sublime.

After that nightmare is over, I get out of bed for real and shuffle in here to write my column.

It starts in Evernote where, somewhere during a bad hallucination, I have written down an idea for this week’s column. “Write about scary clowns,” it might say or “that funny guy I saw peeing behind the library.” These notes take the guesswork out of column-writing. All I have to do is sit down and write 20 inches on the topic at hand. I don’t even need to be awake for it. Sometimes I write without using vowels and NOBODY EVER NOTICES. I once wrote entirely in binary code and it slipped right by you “alert” readers.

“Excellent column today,” you wrote. “Keep up the good work.”

I tell you, column-writing is easy as long as you have your topic in place ahead of time. But this morning, when I got to my desk and checked Evernote, there was nothing there.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Last week’s column idea was there: “Write about piano and how you’ve always wanted to play. Perhaps write the entire piece in musical notes. Not like anyone is going to notice, am I right?”

Not having a column idea at the ready is like not having underpants when you step out of the shower. You try to do that fancy towel wrap thing, but it never works. The towel keeps coming unknotted and you wind up stumbling around half-naked and embarrassed. That might be a metaphor right there. I’m not really sure.

The point is, without a preconceived column idea, you and I have nothing to talk about. We’ll sit here going err and ahhh and umm until we finally give up and start talking about the weather. That beautiful give-and-take we engage in week to week has run dry, with not even a few warm drops rattling around at the bottom of the can.

That also might be a metaphor, but who cares. Metaphors are stupid, anyway.

So here I am, walking around with a towel around my waist, hoping it doesn’t come undone and fall to the floor. But of course it will because towels are also stupid and when you see somebody wearing one in the movies, you know it’s some extravagant special effect. Towels don’t work that way in the real world.

I could just ask someone – one of you people, perhaps –  for this week’s column idea. But when I do that, people tend to start spouting concepts that would require actual work to write about. “Write about prevailing emotional conflicts within the middle class when it comes to the matter of gun control,” somebody will say, and I don’t even know what that means. To me it sounds like: “Write about cheese!”

Ask for column ideas and two-thirds will respond with abstractions pertinent only to them personally. “How about a column about my screeching shrew of a wife and how there’s no way we can afford to go visit her cousins in Oxnard this year and she should just get over it?”

For example. I just wanted to say “Oxnard.”

When I first started writing columns back in Whatever Year it Was, a wise newsman told me: “You can write about having no ideas for a column that day, but you can’t go to that well very often. When you DO go to that well, the trick is to fill column space as quickly as possible. Use a lot of metaphor. Do we have any more heroin?”

But I don’t want to be that kind of columnist. Each week, I want to teach you something — about yourselves or about the community in which we live. Something meaningful, such as: “Did you know they’re using a different kind of rock salt in front of Victor News this winter? Really good stuff. Doesn’t stick to your shoes.”

Well, hey! What do you know about that? I just taught you something. This entire ramble hasn’t been a waste of expensive newsprint after all. I have saved our relationship. You’re welcome.

I hate February.

Oops! There goes the towel.

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