Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m a Mac in a Windows world. I realize my minority-ness. And for the most part, I’m good with it. I love and hug my little Mac and mostly don’t care about the whole big bad Windows world.

But every now and then, Bill Gates pokes his nose into my rosy little Mac-dom.

Tonight was one of those nights.

Every year, every Christmas, I temporarily stuff my Grinchy von Grinchness into somewhere and I write a seasonal letter for family and friends. In years past I’ve written on a company computer (Windows) and e-mailed it to Miss Carol so she could print it on whatever gay holiday paper she’s managed to find.

Then the last coupla years I’ve printed it at home in the Me Only Room ’cause I had an awesome printer. But the printer died wheezing and gasping last year and I didn’t replace it with awesomeness. Truth be told, I don’t print anything anymore. Who needs paper?

So this year I wrote the seasonal letter on my trusty Mac not realizing I had no way of disseminating it.

Oh shit.

After trying ways to make the Mac work with the Windows I gave up and decided the fastest, easiest was would be to just re-type the stupid seasonal letter on Miss Carol’s Window-based HP laptop.

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I did it, finally. I somehow managed to type a 400 word document into that stupid piece of shit.

But I won’t never ever do it again. I’d rather cut my fingers off with pliers.

Windows is the most aggressively anti-intuitive garbage I’ve ever had to deal with. I’d rather Mister Wiggly was attacked by wild dogs.

The cursor kept floating around adding letters to previously typed sentences. It kept trying to help me spell. It kept changing to italic. It was annoying beyond words.

I told Miss Carol if the laptop wasn’t hospital property and if it weren’t Christmassssss I’d a thrown the thing through the window and run out and stomped on it and started up MR.GREENE and driven over it and then stomped on it some more.

Fuckin’ Windows.

Thanks Bill. Merry Christmas.

So this is what happened.

Over the weekend I had to drive to the D.C. area to my Moms house ’cause my brother and me had to replace a big bay window in her kitchen.

We’d  been trying to do this for about three years now, and being the dutiful loving sons we are, we were finally gonna get it down before she, like, died?

So anyway, I left around 5 on Saturday morning, drove up and we worked on it and got it done around 5 that evening then we all went out to dinner and then I went back to my brother’s and his cupcakes’ place and then we drank some more and then none of this was the dreamy part.

The dreamy part happened on the way home.

Driving south on I95 in the pre-dawn darkness I decided to get off the super slab and take Route 17. Just as I merged onto 17 I finished listening to a particularly crappy book on CD (Dance, Dance, Dance by some Japanese dude- don’t ever get it and don’t never ever waste your time reading it- trust me) and so instead of starting another book I flipped over to Sirius/XM and dialed up Coffeehouse.

For those of you that don’t know, Coffeehouse is the channel that plays acoustic versions of songs performed by other artists. Think Pink Floyd by Natalie Merchant. Think Dave Matthews doing Bruce Springsteen covers. Think solo acoustic versions of the Counting Crows.

Flow the dreamy part.

It’d been years since I’d driven 17 and I’d forgotten just how beautifully desolate and lonely and completely bypassed Route 17 was and is. I’m driving along all alone on this forgotten piece of highway and I’m rolling up and down the rolling road, watching the sun slowly rise and warm the frost, and I’m listening to these sad seeming songs and I completely lost myself.

It was the most peaceful and tranquil two hours I can remember in this turbulently busy year. I’m pretty sure it was a combination of lack of sleep and surfeit of alcohol, but it was transcendental. It was Zen-like. It was serene and it was ephemeral. I just drove and flowed and listened. I could’ve driven on and on like that. For hours. For days. For weeks.

It was dreamy.

How much have you ever wanted to just run away?

To just chuck it all.

To just roll and leave everything, absolutely, everything, behind? To become dead to close friends and family knowing you’ll probably never ever see them again. To head off into the far distance knowing you’ll only be seeing strangers for the rest of your time.

could you do it?

Could you leave kith and kin and little doggies and the warmth of the homely hearth behind and strike out into the razor sharp brittle coldness?

could you do it?

Nah, probably not.

Me neither.

But me and Miss Carol are fighting again and it does make me wonder-

could you do it?

I’m flat.

I feel like all the cool edgy funness of the last several months has fizzled and drizzled down the drain and I’m left sitting and staring blankly at life as usual. Out on the bleak landscape facing me, I still have the Little House of Horrors I gotta finish. I still have a job I gotta go to and do everyday.

Don’t get me wrong. Life is good. Real good. Shit don’t suck.

It’s just that. That. (clenched fists and gritted teeth) Ya know what? For a little while there, for a coupla months, I was somebody else. I was vicariously living other lives. I was a trucker. I was a writer. I was somebody new, somebody completely different, somebody somewhere else and it was FUN.

And now it’s back to everything that’s me time and it just flattens me out.

I need a nudge.

This is it, I promise.

My novel, DIESEL2051, finished(?) out at 51299 words and 176 pages.

Am I proud? hell, yeah.

Is it any good? um, don’t know. Miss Carol’s starting to read it tonight. She’s my biggest cheerleader and hopefully my biggest critic.

Am I relieved it’s over? Ya know, it’s funny, but I was. For about an minute. Then I started missing it the way you miss someone you love sitting on your lap when they get up.

Would I do it again? Oh, hell yeah. I’ve dicked around writing shit for years and telling myself I’d finish it tomorrow. It took the self-imposed deadline of an imaginary contest like NaNoWriMo to get me to do it. It really is like running a marathon alone and in the dark and finishing.

So NaNoMo? If you’ve ever wanted to write anything longer than a blog or a tweet (not that those are bad things) do yourself a favor and enter the NaNoWriMo next year. Even if you don’t finish your Great American Novel, you’ll be amazed and exhilarated by what it opens up in you.

Honest.

I did it.

I don’t know how many words I’ve written.

I stumble and stammer and drool and I stare uncomprehendingly at a wall wondering how it got there.

But.

I might be jumping the gun, I may be jinxing myself, but baby, I feel like I’ll make it. I’ve managed to write. every. single. day. for the last 27 days and I’m turning the corner and running slipshod spastically down the last coupla hundred yards, sloppily headed towards the finish line.

But.

A weird thing is happening to me. The closer I get to it, the more I kinda dread the end. I think I’m gonna miss my poorly constructed characters and shoddy story line. I’ve lived with them for a month now, watching with dread their slowly emerging awfulness.

But.

I love them the way you love a puppy with a tumor.

But.

I gotta stop, right? I can’t just keep going can I? Or can I? Bernard Moitessier entered an around-the-world sailboat race and fell in love with it and just kept sailing on past the finish line, sailing around the globe twice. So yeah, maybe I’m actually starting to think that I’ll just keep rolling on after NaNoWriMo folds up it’s tent and moves on.

Where is this all going?

I’m some 32,000 words into it and I’m getting a little bit edgy.

I’m getting a little bit worried, no strike that, a LOT a bit worried that I won’t finish, that my subconscious will tie me up and hold me down and fuck me and laugh at me while it does it.

I’m soooo close, I can almost smell the finish- it washes over me like a freshening breeze.

Come on, baby, I can DO this.