Apparently, it’s acceptable in every journalist’s career to write one article like this. I find it a little disconcerting that I am doing so at the tender age of 23, with (hopefully) many years of writing in front of me. Perhaps the stresses and strains of living a fairly busy life and writing a weekly article have left me burned out. Perhaps all that talk about television rotting my brain and excess sugar rotting my teeth was true, and my entire head cavity is an empty shell. Perhaps I’m just having one of those weeks.

Regardless of the reason, I am sorry to say that this week’s Two Turns Ahead will have absolutely no content at all. I would suggest that if you’re looking for something really good to read on your lunch break, go back and read one of Nate Price’s Draft articles or pretty much anything that Geordie Tait has ever done. Or a nice bit of Dickens.

Apparently, in the early days of television, there was one day when the BBC Ten O’clock News was simply a film of somebody playing the piano for ten minutes because there was just no news. Would that I had such a laudable excuse for my inaction, or indeed so entertaining a way to fill in your time! Unfortunately here, neither is the case.

A study once stated that on CNN, one only actually sees four minutes and forty-five seconds of “real news” per hour. I predict something less within this article. The difference? I am happy to come clean about the lack of content herein.

Previously, I had always considered “writer’s block” to be an excuse thrown around by the underemployed “writers” of the world to explain why, rather than completing their magnum opus, they had in fact been watching daytime television to get some “life experience.” Or perhaps it is like a chopping block designed by wily editors in less clement times to keep their staff working hard. I’m sure that after they have dried long enough, coffee stains on a big wooden block could easily be misconstrued as blood stains.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, it is a very real phenomenon, and no amount of sentences dominated by hyperbole and bad puns will change the fact that I am, at present, blocked. Blocked into a corner by nothing of note, and forced to the conclusion that the corner I’m occupying is only notable in the fact that it, too, is unremarkable.

The world continues to spin at 96,000 miles per second around the sun, and I’m sure that any number of magical, wonderful things are going on all over its surface. Some of them probably even relate to Vs. System.

I urge you to go out and find your own stories. Create your own news. Go outside, take a walk, smile at a girl. Open up your binder to a random page and try to create something new with the card in the bottom left corner. Show somebody new how to play. Show somebody who knows how to play something new. Share whatever it is that makes you happy with somebody else. If it makes you happy, there’s a fair chance that it will make everyone else happy too.

No news should be good news. I hope that this week, it is.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Tim “Shhhhh! It's a secret!” Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com