Blue Monday Visit to the QT

I have to admit to having cheated on my first love.  But I have come back now to be faithful from here on out.  Last Summer I bought one of those free-refill cups at RaceTrac.  But it was unfulfilling.   You only get 20 oz. in the free refill cup.  And the free refills expired at the end of July.  So I have come back to the daily, or even twice daily, 32 oz. cup of Diet Coke from QT.  You knew that’s what I meant, right?

I know all the employees at QT at least by sight if not by name.  I don’t even have to tell them any more that the plastic cup I am using is a carefully saved and cleaned cup so that I deserve the refill price.  (I am not a curmudgeon who has to save ten cents on every purchase.  I do it to re-use and recycle and save the planet Earth from wasted plastic.  Really I do.)  They also know without my saying that even though it says “debit card” on the front, it works as credit.  (Except for that one kinda stupid guy who only works the really late and really early shifts.)  One of the workers there is a neighborhood kid that was in my class for two days when I was a substitute history teacher at Long Middle School nine years ago.  He’s changed a lot from when I first knew him.  He has turned from a goofy, bean-bodied twelve-year-old with big brown myopic eyes and a fly that never stayed zipped into a massive hulk of a twenty-one-year old service station associate worker.  He doesn’t even realize that I knew him when…

Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach

…and I know it is kinda pathetic that I am now so limited in my contact with the rest of humanity, especially with the family away in Florida for Spring Break, me stuck at home with illness and a pooping dog, and being retired without any working-man’s daily duties any more, that a visit to QT is the highlight of my day.  But it isn’t.  The highlight occurs when I start writing.  I enjoy laughing at my own funny-bits in this post, and the novel that I am working on… well, flights of fancy is putting it mildly.  I have been up in World War I biplane, in the midst of a dogfight between a promising young Allied pilot for the Lafayette Escadrille  and a German ace who represents evil incarnate and is being controlled by an evil alien-designed robot from the future.  I also have been in the tunnels under Castle Sinistre, or Château Sinistre as it is known in the Somme.  There I have been with the time-travelling heroes who are trying to rescue a rabbit-man created by an evolutionary science experiment gone wrong and an insane brother-in-law of the scientist who created the rabbit-man.  My imagination breaks free of the stifling cage my old, lame body and my current life have become.

This little essay quite accurately reflects what I write and why I write it.  Happy people and healthy people and normal people would all be on the beach instead of where I am now.  They would never be home-bound Emily-Dickenson writer-people whose daily highlight is a cup of Diet Coke from QT  But I am in the clouds now, somewhere over the rainbow, and I am content, because that’s the corner I’ve written myself into.