Today is Sunday, and with the library closed and the traditional list-as-many-figures-as-I-can* activity in the evening, it's a bit harder day for me to write during. Sometimes I'll get my oil changed on a Sunday, and take my magic notebook into the waiting room with me. Sometimes I will take a chair out back, if it's a sunny day, and write or read in the shade of the Spruce there. Of course, my big escape is the family cabin, which is still unapproachable and snowed in at this time of year (I asked my brother about it today, as I did the last time I saw him--sadly, it's one of the few topics of conversation between us--and he said he thought it would have ten feet of snow around it even in May).
But I'm sitting on my bed, with the smell of Corn Nuts in my nostrils (I dropped a AA battery off the bed a minute ago, and reaching down there to find it, inadvertently tore open a bag of Corn Nuts, which are still scattered all over the carpet down there.**
I really want to be a writer. A successful writer, sure, but a good writer more than that. I read the work that really good writers create, and they stay with me (I keep thinking about Robert Sheckley's "The Store of Worlds" and how much that spoke to me, even though it was years ago that I heard it on Drabblecast, to the point where I wish I were a staff writer on Jordan Peele's "Twilight Zone," so I could see if we could adapt it for the show***), and I want my own work to do that for someone else. Then I think about how, even if I manage to write every day this month, and even if I manage to finish that abandoned book ("Balms & Sears"), I may never put it out there, where it can reach (or not reach) an audience.
Sigh.
So, this may entertain you (it may entertain me if I read it a year from now), but my nephew got a new scooter for Christmas, and today was a nice sunny day, so he took it out on the street to ride around on it. It's the kind of scooter you push with your foot, not the electric kind (or I might not be typing this now), and I was jealous to see him speeding along the sidewalk on it. So I borrowed it. I didn't even ask him if I could use it, I just picked it up after he was done with it and tried to get it going as fast as I could down the street, thinking, "See, I'm not so old after al--" I hit a pothole or a crack in the sidewalk, and the damn thing just stopped, tipping forward, and sending me plummeting onto the pavement. I caught myself with my hands before my face could hit, but my chest hit the handlebar as I went down, and I felt something Pop. Then, I just knelt there on the road, sort of absorbing my crash, and a passing car (undoubtedly coming home from church) decided to toot its horn, just to let me know they had seen my "stunt."
I've been in a kind of low-level pain all day since then, and when I sit, stand, or lean over to pick something up, I feel an unpleasant sensation in my chest not unlike singing I'm Just A Girl last night. I haven't been beaten up in a while (more than half my life, actually), but this was a nice reminder of what that used to feel like.
I did end up sitting down at the end of the night and jotting down a few words, including--
Alec decided he needed to talk to Ana, before he did anything else. If she was anything like he was (and he recognized that she sure didn't seem to be), she would carry her guilt around with her like a backpack filled with cinderblocks. He wanted her to know she wasn't alone, that now that they were in each others' lives again, that they could be in each others' corners. Stuff like that.
"Could I sit down somewhere?" he asked, indicating the house (which he had still not been invited inside). "A couch or a chair. Or a floor with carpet maybe?"
Perhaps he was laying it on too thick. He really did feel awful, but he was used to it, and was aware it would pass. He was like a guy who worked with wood shavings all the time and his fingers had toughed up to where, when he got a sliver or a cut, it barely drew blood.
"Yes, yes, of course," Matthias said, and he stepped up beside him, like he was going to take Alec's arm, but shied away at the last moment, merely pointing him in the direction of the house.
--but it wasn't a lot of writing, and it was rather obligatory, almost as if I was forcing myself to do it to meet some kind of resolution.
Tomorrow will be worse.
Words Tonight: 377
Words Total: 12,800
*I have discovered (or perhaps somebody else pointed it out, and I agree with it), that Sunday evening is when the most people are available to bid on items on eBay. Just like the heyday of network television, when millions of families gathered around the tube to watch, it seems that, it you want your eBay item in front of the most eyes possible, Sunday night is the time to do it. My goal tonight is to list between thirty and fifty figures. Last Sunday night, I only managed about ten.
**I did eat one, and found it soft and stale, which leads me to believe I didn't tear OPEN the bag, but merely spilled the contents of an already-opened bag I had forgotten about. Lovely, no?
***I also keep thinking, since there's a movie remake coming out, of King's "Pet Sematary," and how impactful it was for me. And still is. I think of Jud Crandall saying, "It's only a loon, Louis," when they hear the noises in the forest, and then Louis, all by himself, hearing something huge and ghastly out in the dark and Jud's words coming back, "It's only a loon." And it just gives me chills. At the same time, King hated that book, and regretted its release. "If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don't like it. It's a terrible book, not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don't really believe that." (USA Today interview, May 10, 1985).
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