Aggressively Writing with No Ideas

My mind is numb. I just awoke from a diabetes-enforced nap that I hadn’t planned to take, so I lost about half an hour. I had to edit my own father’s obituary this morning. It goes to the Belmond Independent local newspaper later today. The service will happen over Facebook Live direct from the funeral home. And I don’t feel like writing. But I will anyway. Writing is the only life I have left in me after this gawd-awful pandemic and even worse, plague of a presidon’t… namely Presidon’t Tronald Dump. He was never my president. Still not. I check my watch… still not. But I don’t have a watch. Can’t afford it after the Big Dump.

The children in the above pen and ink are both ghosts. You can’t see through them, but they are both completely white in a scene that is all about bright-light sources on a dark and shadow-filled night. Neither child has any shadows on them even though the full moon and the lighthouse are both behind them, meaning they should both be backlit with the shadow-side towards the viewer.

Why did I draw a picture of ghosts while my father was in the hospice care that kept him comfortable as he was dying? It can’t be because the boy has reached the peak, and he is closer to the heavens than the girl. And the girl is certainly not my mother.

I can’t answer the questions because I still don’t know what I am writing about. I am just rambling and writing down whatever pops into my head, and choosing illustrations by scrolling through the gallery and choosing images at random.

It seems like the author of Look Homeward, Angel is correct. You can never go home again. The people you knew will no longer be there. The farmhouse will be sold, and probably plowed under to make more arable farm land. And the places of my youth themselves have been transformed and almost erased by time. Nothing lasts forever. Nor do we want those things to be changeless forever. Change is what the universe and time within the universe is for.

Sometimes free-writing and free associations can bring peace and quiet to the stressed-out mind. But not today. And I check my watch one more time. Nope, still not… and never will be. Every single thing changes. Yesterday I found out my father had died. And yesterday will never happen again.