What to do when the story is just going nowhere.

Sometimes I will just start writing without a plan or a thought on what I'm writing. I think I do that from a compulsion to write. However it seems that writing without even having an idea of what you want to write about is not the easiest way to write. Take for instance this dialog that I was just writing.

Hey there buddy, what you up to?

oh me? not much.

you ever seen a wet bird fly at night?

a what? I don't think so.

would you like to?

No, if I'm honest I donn't think I care about what a wet bird looks like flying at night.

Well it's not that, because you see it's slang for something.

oh so what does it mean?

I think it has something to do with sex. I don't really know

Yeah it's the ladies man!

who was that?

that was the ladies man!

well how did he get here and why was he talking just now?

I don't know, I thought you might have been the cause of the ladies man.

Perhaps if you talk about wet birds flying at night and sex then the ladies man appears.

yeah, like bloody Mary or something.

Did someone call for the ladies man?

See there he is again!

But where did he go?

probably went to go find a lady, cuz that's what the ladies man does.

Wow that is just fantastic!

So what do you like to do on a saturday night?

I like to go to clubs and dance.

Yeah really? me too! let's go to a club together!

(at the club)

yeah, check out all these fine ladies in the club!

Let's dance!

(they dance)

Yo I spotted a fine lady, I'm gonna go dance with her!

(can't spell hater without h e r)

(he goes to dance with a lady)

Hey baby you so fine let's dance together!

No I don't think so!

As you can see there isn't much of a story there. I will on occasion write things like that, or write dialogs where people are just fighting for the sake of fighting. Good confrontational dialog is funny and fun to write (a good example is "The Taming of the Shrew"). but pointless jabbering of characters is pointless. Or to not have a completely circular sentence, if the story doesn't go anywhere, if you have no idea why these people are fighting then the dialog loses it's snappiness and isn't clever or funny.

So no grand conclusion I just wanted to share the thought... I think it's time to dig into my backlog of ideas, though as I recall many of them are written down on scraps of paper that happen to be in China right now.