Here we go again. Distractions. Always the same, something not right about my position in front for the TV, or about the fact that I’m in the living room with the TV beckoning to me as I try and grind out a few words onto this digital paper. So many new words introduced to the English language in the last decade alone. Hard to keep up. 

Jump up. Grab the dangerous wiry thing that the kitten is threatening to swallow which will surely get lodged somewhere in her intestinal tract if it’s not retrieved. 

This is not easy. 

The words are easy the thoughts too but not the composing. Not the broader picture of telling the story, laying it out, leaving mystery without being too vague and boring. Creating suspense or humor or whatever one tries to conjure up to help themselves believe they’re doing something important or productive with their time.

I have a lot of rust to get off. Shake it, scrape it, whatever it takes but get it out of the cogs. It’s holding everything up. The problem is not with starting. Not with me. At least not most of the time. It’s sticking with it. I have no time. Being a writer is a very glamorous thought; and deceptive. Anyone who writes is a writer. Same as anyone who talks is a talker or lies is a liar. 

It’s always something. It’s hard to write if you don’t read much. Got no words, no understanding of descriptions apart from boring verbs. Something more is needed. Insight; shedding light on a thing. Oh forget it; a better way to communicate. Something better is needed. 

It’s storming tonight. I hear, here, hare the rain pinging on the abandoned metal pipe vents of this nineteen-sixties home.  Hoping the lights don’t go out.  And that my cats aren’t tearing away at the furniture in the back room.

I just don’t want trouble period. Who does? I want mornings to sleep into. And coffee to leisurely wake up with on the porch.

I don’t cook now precisely because I am too tired and have no time.  And though a woman may catch her game, she will certainly starve if she doesn’t take the time to roast it. 

Let’s go get dessert; ice cream? No, actually just brush my teeth so I can go to bed. Why can’t teeth be like eardrums? I don’t have to brush my eardrums before bed. Albeit, I’m not sticking skittles into my ears to digest, never mind…

Perhaps I should keep the notebook near just in case a dream or sleep-thought is a good one and I need to wrap the butterfly net over it quickly in the dark before it gets away.

Sleeping is good. Still rusty and need to do something to shake the consequences of sedentary thought out of my ears and eyes and well, off my life. I just want to get up to feed the kittens. They are really hungry tonight.  Ravenous is a better word I think. I should have used ravenous. 

I should read more.

And the fact that my nose feels like a block of clay. It’s the middle of winter and it was 79 degrees yesterday and 30 something right now. So I just asked Siri to open the weather app.

Silence.

And she should be on standby listening to me so I don’t have to press the button each time. Or key or whatever.  Dear Jesus.  Fix her already. 

I don’t know what to do next. And now I’m hungry. Anyway, I need a plan. Do I need to start thinking about what type of book I want to write? 

Storyline

Characters

Plots 

And foibles 

I just don’t know

Still rusty. 

I can think back on little sparks of ideas that seemed so good and I never wrote them down, never captured them or if I did, I don’t know where the slips of paper I scratched disappeared to. Perhaps buried or crushed or thrown away; lost forever. Those ideas and thoughts were in my mind; so vivid and true. 

Now they are gone. Unbelievable. 

And I’m hungry. Why didn’t I go to the grocery store last week. Oversight. Now I have to eat canned spaghetti sauce over cooked noodles. So bland and boring. But I’m hungry and didn’t go to the grocery store. 

This time, I didn’t even hunt my game.

Featured Image by Jess Bailey