Goddam Muses
My Muse has fallen silent. She’s never really had much to say to me, but lately I’m getting nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Which is, I think, extremely ungrateful, given the fact that I not only let her live in my head, but also feast on a veritable treasure trove of repressed subconscious angst. And besides … just look at her. She’s a vaguely humanoid reptilian gecko creature with four heads and a big thwapping tail with spikes lining the sides. She has breasts, lots of them, but they’re in all the wrong places. Three of her heads are smoking a cigarette at all times, and the fourth is usually drinking a scotch on the rocks. Very occasionally, the scotch head puts its glass down, belches, looks around for another drink and, if it can’t find one, leans down and whispers something in my ear. A snatch of prose, maybe, or a skeletal description of a character. Or maybe just a bit of dialog. And then she turns to another one of the heads and starts screaming at it to help her look for some more fucking booze.
This is what I have to work with. It’s tragic.
And it’s getting worse. For the past month, she hasn’t said a word to me. She sits there flipping through fashion magazines and eating twinkies and watching the Home Shopping Network. Sometimes the heads have spitting competitions. Sometimes they try to gnaw each others’ ears off. She’s just a terrible tenant.
This morning I sat at Starbucks staring at the trainwreck of the story I’ve been flailing at for the past month, beseeching her for something, anything. She ignored me, pretty much, though sometimes I’d get a flat stare, or a nasty little chortle.
This morning I decided to abandon the story. It’s going nowhere, and it’s going there slowly. Writing a story without Muse Juice is like driving a car without gas. You don’t drive it, you push it, which means you can’t steer it at the same time, you can’t get on highways, you can’t get anywhere fast, and, most likely, you can’t get anywhere at all.
So maybe I’ll start something else, though I don’t for the life of me know what. There’s nothing in the tank. I look inward, and all I see is the drunk head chugging Old Milwaukee through a bong while the smoking heads cheer her on.
Maybe she’s waiting for some sort of a sacrifice. Maybe she wants me to quit my day job and hole up in a filthy apartment and starve for a couple of years. Maybe she wants me to start writing romance novels, or midget erotica, or cookbooks for epicurean cannibals. Maybe she wants to join a masochist bat cult, or schedule a series of barium enemas, or transcribe the entire text of War and Peace backwards.
I don’t know what she wants. She won’t tell me.
Goddam muses.
1 Comment