National Nitwit

(Manchester, VT) Writer David Mitchell Owens, suffering through a two-week case of writer's block, said that all of his "old standby" remedies have failed him.

"Jim Beam usually gets the creative juices flowing, but the bourbon let me down," he said, knocking back another double shot on the rocks. "I've been hitting the bottle hard for well nigh over a week, but I can't even come up with an interesting character, let alone an actual plot or storyline. Fuck me!"

Owens, who is currently working on his second novel, has had a "fair amount" of success as a short story author, and his first novel - Dripping Drawers - has been accepted by a vanity publisher. The struggling author said that his attempts at a "psychedelic jump-start" to his creativity also failed.

"I called up this old stoner friend of mine, and we went on a 48-hour LSD bender," he recalled, shaking the ice in his glass. "I saw some freaky visions, but I'll be damned if I can remember any of them."

Snorting cocaine to get the creative mojo a-happening

As a last resort, said Owens, cocaine has always proven to be an effective method of getting past writer's block for him.

"It used to be that a couple of grams of Bolivian marching powder and I could crank out 50 pages of material," he said, closing his eyes. "But after three days and $1000, all I could come up with was some shitty poetry about bad relationships. At this rate, I'll have to graduate to crystal meth and heroin to get any work done."