Namo amitabha Buddhaya, y'all.
This here's a religious establishment. Act respectable.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Bloggus Interruptus Temporaricus

I know how it is.  You clock in here every Thursday evening and expect there to be a bright shiny new blog post.  And usually there is, unless something weird happens and instead of hangin' at Afrah with my laptop and the World's Greatest Pita Bread (TM), I end up uptown in some therapist's office talking to my toes about why I was afraid of doorknobs when I was six.  (That's purely hypothetical, by the way.  I was not at all afraid of doorknobs when I was six.  I was afraid of heater vents.)  My OA meeting, which is also on Thursday evening, is hell and gone from Cartagenia from uptown, so if I end up in both places on the same night, I'm usually driving too fast between and eating a sandwich.  As opposed, you know, to grooving to the Jordanian beat and sipping lemonade and typing up a blog post.

In honest fact, I don't think I've had my laptop on for anything more exciting than paying bills in at least a week.  Maybe two.  Oh, I've been writing like crazy, but the sentences tend to start out "Plaintiff OBJECTS to this Interrogatory in that the Defendant is a moron and has written this Interrogatory for the sheer purpose of taxing this paralegal's vocabulary." Well, that's how I'd write them if I got to choose the words, that is.  It's been insane at my office and when I'm not writing discovery I'm writing petitions, and when I'm not writing petitions I'm writing letters.  (You guys might think this funny, but it's only been in the last six months or so that I got over the notion that every letter I write doesn't have to be a shining example of deathless prose that will stand forever among American letters.  No, really, sometimes I can just write "Enclosed is a copy of something you might wanna look at.")  So my creative drought, which I thought I might be coming out of, seems to have stretched out a little longer.

Well, luckily for me I just started another class.  This one's based on a book called "Writing Down The Bones," or From The Bones, or maybe On The Bones, I can't remember.  It's very good, though.  It's based on Zen the same way that The Artist's Way was based on the Twelve Steps.  So obviously I've hooked up with the right group of people.  (Zen, Twelve Steps, whatever.  Just sign me up.)  And hanging with other writers is actually as weird as it is cool, but is worth it for the moments when it is both.  Last week we did a focused writing for ten minutes on a completely innocuous subject, and I started out not expecting it to be any big deal.  Perish the thought; all this anger came pouring out.  I did not expect that.  I knew I was frustrated and concerned and so on about the situation I was writing about, but it never once occurred to me I might also be pissed off. Well, hey, I'm an ex-Lutheran.  We don't get mad unless somebody tells us to, and even then, all we generally do is shake our heads at the offending party and say, "I'm very, very disappointed."

Huh.  That's actually all I have to say at this time.  Well, that and "Plaintiff OBJECTS to..." something or other.  It's late, I'm tired and traffic is ugly out there.  Hopefully I'll be back in pita-bread-fueled fighting form by Thursday.  If not, I'll rerun something from my wild youth in San Diego, back BB (Before Blogging.)  Either way, cheers, kids.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love that book (Writing Down the Bones). You don't really need it... but carry on!