The question was asked, “Where are you in your yarn?” My face doesn’t move, but my thoughts pull free from the backs of my eyeballs as if somebody snatched my brain right out of my occiput. My eyeball nerves spin around each other, more rapid by the millisecond like helicopter blades, creating a migraine between my ears bad enough to think the Devil decided to use them to do hemp weaving. The cyclone motion created by my whirring eyeball nerves drives its spiral down into my guts into that empty space not meant to see the sun and I feel like diarrhea. Yes, you got it. Both the thing and the act.

Please remove your happy face from my direct line of sight. I am not the golden calf and don’t have time to placate you at this very second. I am waving my hand at you like you are in front of the TV. Or perhaps a strange safari communication technique. I just want to write, because I feel like…

…if I don’t…

…the less clicks the keyboard sticks, the more sure that my heartbeat sputters words, like cholesterol dulling each dwindling beat on the hardwood floor. The words splay like jacks around me, clacking their little pointy ends along their way away from me. Oozing and pointy, little letters trying to escape.  

I peruse the day that lay before me and consider that I may be taking things a bit too dramatically. So, I take off my sweatshirt and hang my head upside down on my bed so my short hair swishes the floor as I shake my head clear from the overwhelming black blanket of the Hole (the place that I fall through and lose track of time while writing).

Ah, yes, there it is. Despair. Thin and long. Stretching out to infinity so that you squint enough that your eyes go bad, an active aging through its acts. Where does it end? Never does! Ha! Just like the character in Ender’s Saga (by Orson Scott Card), tracing the path and counting the grains of the wooden floor until infinity comes to claim me. But, with much less insight and popularity. 

Self imposed goals and paths. Self imposed tortures along the way. Such is the task of the writer. Like taking a putty chisel to the well-thickened semi porous residues of the white plaster waves inside my skull. You could probably grow flowers inside there. But, that’s another story. 

“My ‘yarn’?” I say, laughing with a smile like a conspirator. “Going just fine. Wish it would stay in one place enough to catch on to something linear. Water wiggle thoughts.” I hesitated a beat, then said, “But, it’s ok to not grasp them completely. Just allow myself to be amused and see what I grab that day. I always think I have time to ponder them later if they are worth anything, and I hope I do. Sometimes good ideas come in pieces.”

I think that was too much talking for my coffee companion. They ask for a meet and greet and I am standing in line while waxing poetic like a backwards Barbara Walters. Least I didn’t cry. But there is still time.