Incongruous Inconsistency Syndrome, more commonly known as Writer's Block, is a debilitating condition that moves insidiously from its birthplace, in the pit of our souls, to the extremes of our creative potential. It destabilizes the creative processes which lives within us all and that's its only purpose for existing. It is born in the blisters created by the friction fundamentals in our cultural system and/or our creative dissimilarities. In a crowd, it can strike just one potential victim, several victims at once, or any possible combination of available hosts while completely ignoring others within the same confined area. Individually, in literary circles, it usually forms at the point of contact between the writer and publisher, the writer and editor, or, in the worst cases, between the writer and a fresh, clean, unmarked sheet of pure white paper.

A creative writer, once beset with Incongruous Inconsistency Syndrome, spends precious time picking at imaginary pieces of lint, sorting paper clips and can often be heard mumbling to themselves as the condition progresses. The syndrome will derail the writer's train of thought and transpose key ideas and inspirations as though he was dyslexic. It will salt epic verse with gutter vulgarity, pepper the most eloquent prose with tasteless language and make the most beautiful song sound as if it were coming from the voice box of a cancer of the larynx patient. The victim's sensitivity to the slightest irritant becomes so acute that the hint of a breeze or the far off buzzing of a bee approaching a pollen-laden flower or the strains of a growing tree will stifle his inspiration. It seems as though your grasp on fantasy is frozen as if boiled away by the heat of a single candle. If that is not enough to send you into the bowels of non-creativity, there are other mitigating forces that will contribute to your dilemma; your spell checker will fail you, your grammar checker will mock you and your word processor will crash. You will not create today as the syndrome had won and befuddled your command of the language; it is the dreaded Writers Block!

Conditio sine qua non syndromies, those seemingly harmless but highly disruptive entities that attack the much weaker filtering mechanisms of our literary powers, are responsible for our irritations with everything that is irrelevant around us. Rather than trying to defeat these awesome forces, we will tend to succumb to the frivolous act of waiting and sitting it out. We will also ignore the ever-present little voice in the back of our minds that says to our subconscious "Deadlines missed ruin careers!" This thought, felt actually, more than heard, can give rise to an all consuming fear of failure that can dim the tiny intuitive spark needed to again ignite the explosive miracle of inspira-tional genius. Syndromies cause an isometric imbalance within us that distorts our focus and casts shadows on our goals by confusing our cognitive functions and pitting creative genius against perseverance. Once the first seed takes root in a fertile mind, you will see unrestricted growth. Soon, many tiny irritants will join forces to wreck havoc and cause disruption of purpose resulting in a progressive takeover of the victim's creativity. Once initiated, this process is self-regenerative and requires no further infection, as victims are usually unaware of its presence.

However, rejoice in the knowledge that these perpetrators are easy too ignore and the condition that they cause easy to prevent. The symptoms are obvious and the cure is simple. Believe in yourself and your power to create; that will make you immune to Incongruous Inconsistency Syndrome. If you laugh at it, mock it, and simply deny its existence it will render itself asunder and crumble to dust before your very eyes. If you know it is coming, it cannot even arrive. But know this; Incongruous Inconsistency Syndrome never sleeps, never eats, and never dies. It may never show it's ugly face, but it is always with us. It is with us all.