Napkins

It is its own brand of "frustrating" -- to look at a project and think inside, "what the hell was I thinking?"

"What the hell was I thinking" is a catch-all - the kind of phrase that aims to question every action involving subject-action, and then determine what may have went wrong and where.

Of course the answer is really simple: I STOPPED writing.

And why?

Enter the Masochist: "because you are a half-talented and otherwise lucky... Hack. You've the discipline of a block of cheese trapped in hell. Yeah, that melts, but at least it stays together!"

He goes on: "The corpse of the reanimated Lord Byron would not wipe the maggots out of his royal ass with the pages you put out."

"Easy now," says the Mediator, "abusive language will get us no where."

Then the Apologist, sensing opportunity, creeps out of the corner and opens up: "there just hasn't been any time," he says, "all the hustle and bustle, the work, the lack of sleep... this stuff is hard, you know."

Finally, enter Super Ego (aka: Grand Poo-bah, Captain Billy Bad Ass and King Daddy Big Dick): "just write - quit being such a bitch."

The Mediator shakes his head and the Apologist puts his hands in his face - fending off tears, most likely. Meanwhile, the Masochist nods with agreement.

Truth be told, I've dirtied plenty of napkins in the last year or so. There are problems, though, with napkins - disastrously obvious problems. Yet I cannot help but put myself in the state and/or condition when such a thing seems like a good idea. Aside from the haughty world-loathing waiter or waitress crumpling it up, dumping into the left over soup while I'm in the bathroom, there is just plain old losing them, forgetting them. Any combination of the two dooms a napkin to the mercy of The Dreaded Spin Cycle or the waste bin. After that - a night's worth of scrawling, if I can find it, is reduced to a pocketful of potential bellybutton lint.

So I got smart, invested in some notepads -- even that didn't help. The first one drowned in a sea of Wooky Jack and coffee and the second one was murdered by a band of malicious cats. The third notebook, the one with a pleasant-looking leaf pattern - was loaned to a beautiful woman and never returned. While I let that one go, the fourth notebook was hard to get over: it had the original draft of a story I was actually working on - and it was sucked out of the passenger-side window somewhere between here and Yosemite. If it had a name, I would have screamed it till my voice turned coarse.

Return to nature, indeed.

Somewhere between there and conscious thought, I realized some thing: the electronic form!

Eureka!

Then the Purist began belly-aching, making note of all the pencil scratches I left in a storage bin in Visalia. The Realist shut the Purist up rather quickly, accusing him with doing "purely nothing." Somehow, we wound up here.

Purist, Realist, Masochist, Apologist, Mediator - I should have myself checked for a latent case of schizophrenia. Of course, I could just settle myself with the idea that people are multidimensional creatures, that we live in 3D and act in four. That could just be the Apologist speaking, too.

Anyway -- the point of this post is to say that I am back - and that there is more to come.

I need to rework myself into the habit of writing and you, dear reader, get to put up with it. 

Meanwhile: Mahalo.