I woke up expecting a post-headache day. I should not have been surprised that I didn’t meet my expectation. I went to bed last night with someone pounding on my head yelling, “let me in, I know it’s three in the morning, but just open up,” and even when I did open the door, there was nobody there, probably some kids that rang my bell and ran away, only to return and do it again to see how long I would fall for the same trick. I thought that once I fell asleep, I would awake to a perfect day where the birds’ early morning chirping (there don’t seem to be any birds in Seattle for the record) and the sun, peeking behind the trees and snowy mountains, would wake me up with a slow request, more like the slight tap on the shoulder that you ignore until you decide that, yes, it’s time for me to wake up, but I’m waking up because I want to, not because you’ve been tapping me incessantly on the shoulder. It was more a gentle reminder than an incessant tapping. Do you know about what I’m talking? (Isn’t Word’s grammar checker wonderful? I would have written that last sentence as “Do you know what I’m talking about” if not for the squiggly green line. Now not only is it grammatically correct, it’s also pretentious.) But it was not to be. I was doomed to wake up with my head pounding and my daily prospects looking bleak.

That was before, and this is now. While my head is not painless, it is better when I don’t move it too much. I’m trying to keep it completely still for this moment. Ouch. I moved my head, the pain returned, and with it a need for distraction. I’m easily distracted without caffeine. That’s why I like caffeine. It provides a level of concentration that I don’t normally obtain. With it, I can spend hours typing away without distractions rearing their deformed heads. It’s been too long since I wrote anything remotely story-ish. I’m going to do that today. I just need to keep my head straight for the next hour.

I’m back. I thought I would be finished with writing my story by now, but distractions won out when I closed up earlier. I’m now sitting with my laptop in no-children position, eating peanut M&Ms and contemplating if I have anything of value to write. I have four M&Ms left, two blue, one green, and an orange or red—it’s hard to see in the low light. In the time it took me to come up with something else to write (which I still haven’t), I finished them. There’s no joy in Mudville—I ate the last M&M.

Inspiration continues to elude me. I’m lying down, trying to come up with something, anything, to say, but all I have in me is consternations and clock glances, neither of which will increase my word count or put forth anything worth reading let alone writing. But I’m typing, and that’s all that counts. After reading the Casey poem, my thinking has dropped into the cadence of the poem. It’s sometimes hard to break out of a poetic rhythm once you fall into it. I have the same problem with short sentences. If I start writing short sentences, when I edit them, I find myself slipping into a singsong rhythm. That should give me reason not to write short sentences, but I find myself strangely attracted to them. I have to make a conscious effort to breakup my prose into longer and shorter sentences. Part of it depends on what I’m writing. I remember stories where I tried to be verbose, sometimes insanely so—particularly when I was attempting to feebly imitate DFW. There are other times, the lady from Two and Eleven for example, where I purposefully filled the prose with short, stark sentences, to see how it would read.

Speaking of bad stories, I’m thinking of pulling up some of my older stories and seeing if I can work them into something readable. I’m sure even following my three-month editing rule, I can find a couple of entries of prose that have been languishing, unloved, for longer than three months. I’m thinking out loud, or its written equivalent—I wonder what that would be, perhaps in writing, which I’m not sure if there is a not in writing, writing, but now I’m just babbling incoherently—here. This might be a trick by my unconscious brain to force me to find a distraction. It does that. I might be sitting down to seriously write (as opposed to what I’m doing now), and my brain will, unknown to me, throw distractions that sound useful my way. For example, when I wrote the Mudville sentence, I, of course, went to the internet to find the name of the city in the poem, which, in its own way, led to me reading the history of the poem, and other useless sites with no bearing on what I originally went to the internet to find. Would that paragraph have been as good without that reference? Clearly. Particular since I thought the wording fit better than it ended up fitting, i.e., I thought the words might flow better in the context of the poem, but they didn’t. And now, my trickster brain wants me to look through old musings for relics of writing. I see through its childish attempts to distract me.

As another example, after heavy rains last week, my porch was leaking a bit into my kitchen. I first felt it while I sat where I’m sitting now, on my couch in my living room. The water, a slight drip making its way through a wooden beam, would hit the wall overlooking my living room, bounce off the wooden banister, and drip onto my living room floor. Some of the misting drops would make it to me sitting on my couch. (I know that doesn’t make sense, don’t bother trying to picture it. I somehow cannot convey images well. Doolies told me that my attempt to describe Charlie’s drawing of Roger’s nose in my Flying Toe Stomp story was pitiful.) Suffice to say, after feeling the drips last week, I tracked down their source, found the leak in the wooden beam, and freaked out. After consulting my housing guru, also my brother-in-law, Doolies and I caulked the porch this past weekend. Okay, she caulked and I supervised. She was unimpressed by my caulking ability and took the gun away from me early on in the process. The point of this digression is, I’m sitting here writing tonight, and I’m feeling drops falling from above me. Unlike this weekend, it’s been raining all day here, a product I’m convinced of Doolies no longer visiting. If she came more often, I wouldn’t have to worry about the rain. As I was saying, I’m sitting here, typing away, and I keep feeling microscopic drops of water hitting my exposed skin. I’ve raced up three times looking for wetness on the wood, but each time I found nothing. It’s my brain distracting me from my attempts to write. Either that or I am going crazy. That’s a distinct possibility as well.

I’m going to give my brain the benefit of the doubt and try to find something worth editing for tomorrow. I might try to do some of it today, but I don’t think I’ll finish it. There’s another drop! I’ll be right back. It is official: I’m going insane. Dry as a, I was going to say the standard ‘bone,’ but seeing as I’m trying to be a better writer, I try to avoid clichés. And, besides, why are bones dry? Most of the bones I eat (and I presume are inside of me) are quite moist, or, at the very least, surrounded by moist tissue. I’m going to go with, dry as a Seattle summer. There has to be something for me to look forward to, right? Now, I’m off to search through sewcrates.com. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

I’m not going to get to it today (because I’m a lazy, lazy man, as I’m sure you figured out eons ago), but I’m going to give a run at the two vignettes I wrote back in June, well past my three month limit. They’re not particularly meaningful, but I enjoyed writing them. At the time, I was high on caffeine and sitting on a train or plane going somewhere. I forget exactly where or what, but I’m sure it involved Doolies in someway. I’m not saying I’ll get to it tomorrow, but when I find myself staring at the blank screen with inspiration a million kilometers away, I’ll remember that I posted the link in this musing, and try to turn those vignettes into more interesting ones.

That’s all from this side of the moon.