Intermission

I need a break. From writing.

Everyone needs a break from time to time, I believe, even when it’s from something they love doing, and I do love writing, more than I love, say, calling up a client’s landlord to yell at them or trying to talk some bigshot million-dollar attorney into slumming it with a volunteer case.

I need a break from writing and I know this because these days, it’s all been turning up dark. Perhaps you’ve noticed. You can admit it. Even if you didn’t notice my whole bit about the multiverse-suicide thing or the crying-at-Shane’s-feet-for-all-Eternity thing, then you couldn’t help but have noticed by the time I got around to the one about the homeless drunk woman coughing up blood in my back seat.

That story doesn’t get any brighter, by the way.

I wasn’t going to write about that last one at all because it is so dark and because I’ve been trying to edge my way into some warmer material. Something like maybe Studio Ghibli might do. But then there was an old lady in a house dress standing on the curb at the ER and she had a walker and she said, “Don’t worry, your friend has already transferred to another body,” and I thought, Well, this seems a lot like something I’d write about in my blog, and you just can’t pass up good blog material when the Universe smiles on you like that.

I’ll get back to Gabble, Rabble, and Ross soon enough.

Sometimes I walk all day because it gets my mind off of dark thoughts and writing, and yesterday, I decided to walk to Mom and Dad’s house. Nineteen-plus miles away. It was working, too, but then it got to be something like 98 degrees out and started storming and at some point, the thought occurred to me that maybe sitting in my room writing about death wasn’t so bad after all.  

I got to about three miles away from Mom and Dad’s, though. That’s pretty good.  

I called up Mom and I said, “You know how sometimes a cat will climb a tree and then not be able to get back down?”

Mom said, “Oh God, Harry! You’re stuck in a tree?!”

I admit it makes me a little sad to know that Mom believes her forty-something year old son might be the sort of man who goes off and gets himself stuck in a tree. I bet it made her a little sad, too.

“It’s just an analogy, Mom!” I said. I broke the good news that I wasn’t stuck in a tree at all but instead, was merely standing in a thunderstorm on Antoine, sixteen miles from home and needing a ride to somewhere – anywhere – that might offer a little more in the way of coolness and dryness.

She got to me so quickly that I half-wondered if she hadn’t been following me around the whole time. Maybe to keep me out of trees. She brought dry towels and the first thing she said to me was “What’d they end up deciding to do with your friend who died last week?” which really closed the circle on what had set me off on this road to begin with.

The words don’t come and when they do come they’re dark and it probably means I need to take a break from writing. Probably from other stuff, too. But something like that’s never stopped me before. 

I’ll be seeing you soon.