Saturday, October 10, 2015

The Effects of the Flu on Stew

I need to tell you something. I feel really badly that I didn't tell you at the beginning of the spring because there have been so many gaps here and you deserved an explanation for why I seemed to have abandoned you.

Despite a total lack of supporting evidence that I'm qualified, I'm editing material for a book. It's a long process and I don't usually like to write about writing, but I promise I haven't intentionally left you, all twelve of you, in the lurch about what lunatic thoughts I've had in my head in the past few months. I'm trying to clean my ideas up as I edit, but my head is revolting, rebelling, not actually disgusting though that's not far from the truth of the matter. My mind doesn't want to be cleaned up, so I'm having trouble editing the spooge that flows out of it. I keep telling it to behave but it's like a nasty little sister, swishing its hips and snorting at the same time with its middle finger up its nose. My sister used to hate when I did that.

So after I'm done with my editing, prodigious volumes of futile editing, I'm hoping to convince a publisher to print at least twelve copies of my book, one for each of you, and to send me on a world tour so I can put my book directly into your hot little hands. Would you read it? Well, you're still here and after years of dedication, so it's the least you deserve, don't you think?

Here are some titles I've been toying with:

Finding Joy in the Lunatic Mind
Dog Poop Stories and other Adventures in Holey Plastic
Bitch Mom
Love and Misadventures in a Canoe
Insomniac
Ravings and the Corporate Manifesto on Getting More for Less
Distortion of Memory and Why I Jumped Out of the Damned Tree
and
Simple Rantings

Do you think that more than the twelve of you would buy a copy? See, I haven't done a thing toward the publishing end of it. Not one thing. All I've done so far is write crap and look for typos and other garbage to delete. I may have deleted a whole volume by now. Think of the size of Diana Gabaldon's first book of Outlander and she, so successful in the words that she wrote. I wonder if my volume is like antimatter to her volumes of matter? Every beautiful thing must have its opposite.

Have you ever noticed that? Beautiful women so often have ugly hands. For all the mountain and lake scenes, there are a dozen ugly soy fields or littered alleyways. Everyone with a favorite teacher or coworker has had the control-freak teacher or avoided the creepy guy who worked three cubicles down and seemed to walk to the parking garage the same time as them every night. Good and evil, yin and yang, matter and antimatter.

I need to stop now.

The more recent news is that I avoided writing about the effects of the stomach flu I had this week. I'd bet you would thank me for that. The worst part was what it did to my mind to have to cook for my family anyway. I made stew. Ew. See, as I stirred the thickening pot, odd ideas crawled into my mind. I hate when that happens.

I didn't yet have an appetite, so it was hard to cook. It was hard to see the similarity between Teddy's dog food and what I was making. It was hard to think of the microscopic creatures that might fall from my face into the stew as I stirred it. It was hard to think of what might have been living in my very breath as I looked down into the steamy lumpy gray gunge.

Nick and Mike ate that stew enthusiastically. I couldn't stomach it. I'm better now, but I still can't.

Thank you for listening, jb




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