Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Ramble On

I’m sitting in a foreign Starbucks, in the far Northern Kingdom of Frederick, watching two flies locked in some sort of martial/marital embrace, spinning down to the ground in a frantic death spiral. Fine by me. I’m not much of a fan of flies, or any insects, really. I mean, they’re not as bad as geese, but still: they’re icky and crawly and many-legged, and they wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, which is just obscene.

I once read a particularly bad Stephen King story called The Mist, in which a crack opens up in the fabric of space/time and all of these large insectile creatures tramp into our dimension and start kicking ass. I think that’s what it was about, anyway. The only thing I can really remember is the image of a huge cockroach seen from below, trundling At-At-like across a misty, ruined landscape. I wish I hadn’t read that story. It makes me feel all oogy. Soon afterwards, I read another King story in which a guy trapped starving on a desert island starts cutting off pieces of himself and eating them. That story bothers me a lot less. I think that says something very troubling about my mental state, but I’m not sure what it might be.

I once woke up from a bad dream to find my skin grown cracked and desiccated, like a desert landscape. As I watched, the cracks widened, and green shoots of some many-headed broccoli-like thing grew out of the cracks, slowly, inexorably covering my body in a thick carpet of mottled green. And then I woke up again, for real this time, nauseated and retching. To this day, the thought of that dream makes me want to puke.

Yesterday, while walking the hell-beagle, I found a crushed can of Budweiser on the sidewalk; then, turning a corner, another. And then another, a whole line of them, leading off the sidewalk across the lawn of the nearest house and up the stairs to the front stoop, where an open pack of cigarettes lay unattended on a bench, and a child’s bike leaned against the railing. It was like I’d stumbled into the alcoholic’s edition of Hansel and Grettel. The juxtaposition of the bike with these strewn paraphernalia of minor vice was faintly disquieting. And then the beagle tried to ingest the remains of a dead squirrel, and I forgot all about it.

Annie Difranco says:

And they say that alcoholics
Are always alcoholics
Even when they’re dry as my lips
For years
Even when they’re stranded on small desert islands
With noplace in two thousand miles to buy beer

And I wonder is he different
Is he different
Has he changed
What he’s about
Or is he just a liar
With nothing to lie about

So here’s what I’m saying, basically: I don’t feel like doing any writing this morning. I think the best thing to do when you don’t feel like writing is to write something else. One of my teachers told me to write letters, but letters are a quaint anachronism in this our electronic age, so I can’t do that. So I thought I’d just do a generalized thought-spew instead, and see where that got me.

Not very far, alas. I now have something else to not feel like doing anymore.

well, i find that my main problem now is that i don’t have any time to write other than in the wee hours of the morning when i am dead tired having come back from work or in the dead of night when i am dead tired having gone through the day.

so.

writing activity as well as reading is a bit of a joke at the moment at my house…