Rubbish

Posted on 21 March 2010

What better way to kick this thing off, which is ostensibly to be to share my thoughts on writing, than to share the thoughts I’m having about writing this very thing, which is to say: irritable ones.

Though at the end of a tiring day filled with children climbing on my head, the dreamy warmth having worn off from a delicious Friday night excursion, I would rather drug myself to sleep with wine or otherwise numb the brain with a disturbing crime show on television, I find the words of what might be, but isn’t guaranteed to be, a good story, hammering the inside of my skull. And they won’t leave me alone.

Unless, of course, I don’t play with them.

Then, they’ll go off all pouty in the corner, arms folded and noses in the air, as if my being too tired for them, too petulant and sober to get excited about them, injures their sensibilities and it’s all just too much, thank you.

So I take my scribbled notes and sit in my dining room, which, my neighbor tells me, looks lovely from her vantage. From her room across the alley she sees the robin’s egg blue, the deep wood of the mission style china cabinet, the top of my Macbook. She cannot see the cluttered table top, the sewing machine waiting for more unfinished work, the oddities strewn everywhere (from my seat I count a rolling pin, half a curtain rod, one pink M&M, a measuring stick, and the slats from an Ikea bed which is not even assembled at the moment).

I imagine her view, then: the peaceful expanse of blue, a dimmed overhead chandelier. I imagine she can see the words I’ve jotted on receipts and dollar bills: “to kiss you, that’s the thing,” “dirt under my nails from the day’s gardening,” “animals,” “pieces of a woman.”

I will assemble this into something, and the reader will never see the mess; instead, he will look at it through a window, across an alley, and see a perfectly framed and romantically lit thing fashioned, if one has good long-distance vision, from the stuff I forgot to throw away.