“If it weren’t fer bad luck, I’d have no luck at all… Gloom! Despair! And Agony on Me!” I often think of that old Hee-Haw! song when bad luck continues to pile up on me in waves… err… waves of bad luck crest over me in piles… or some other gol’ danged mixed
Some of my tip money, artfully backlit so you might not notice they are all ones.
metaphor.
After the tax man took all my spare change and dollars I didn’t have to spare, we woke up Monday morning to the Princess still down with flu and me with no more doctor-bill money. Fortunately there are a few things I can still do about it. I mean besides eat chocolate and play with dolls.
I have been able to earn extra money by driving for Uber. I have been mostly delivering meals for restaurants who use Uber Eats, but I have also delivered folks to the airport, taken non-car-owners to work, and occasionally delivered drinkers to liquor stores. (You wouldn’t believe some of the rationalizations and excuses and made-up stories I have heard from people who regret being sober.) This last week I made $102 on 11 fares plus the cash you can see in my hand. It may not seem like a lot to you, but for someone who feels sick 95% of the time, it is miraculously helpful to have a job that won’t fire you if you are repeatedly too sick to work. And I don’t drive if there’s any hint of not being well enough. I can’t afford an accident caused for any reason. And you get to talk to people. Most of them just want to quietly ride and look at their phones. But some of them ask me questions and strike up story-telling liars’ duels. (Yes, I know I don’t have to lie to come up with a funny story about being a teacher, but lying, especially exaggerating, is a required part of a teacher’s job. And that goes for any other kind of story-teller too, so they lie to me more than I lie to them.) Three straight weeks I have made $100 or more a week. (Not a lie OR an exaggeration). And that helps.
I had some necessary yard work to do where the pool used to be. I had thistles growing that needed to be cut down. So I pitched in and got that done… in the nude. Be glad I didn’t take any pictures of me doing the actual work. Thistle cutting naked? I am not a nudist in order to offend people. It was just a way of working off stress without working up a sweat. It was a cool morning. And the yard in question is in the middle of the city, but fenced in on all sides. And no one can see in without climbing the outside of the fence or locating an un-patched hole. That would be their bad, not mine.
And of course, I have been working on my humor writing. What other excuse is there for the last paragraph? And I just published a humor novel, Superchicken, and started working on publishing another, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
There are many more ways to heal the mind of dark depression than you might imagine. Of course, I did also buy chocolate covered peanuts again, and played with dolls again this morning. Old nudist fools with their Cirque du Soleil clown noses rarely learn new tricks.
Writing the Critical Scene
It is a novel I started writing in 1998 with an idea I first got in 1976. So I have been working on this book for either 20 years, or 32 years, depending on when you want to credit the actual work to have started.
It got it’s theme from the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten in 1966, and the feeling the repressed memory of the trauma caused in me whenever I asked myself the question, “Am I a monster?”
Unfortunately the answer to that question, for practically everybody, is, “Sometimes yes.”
Psychological damage sticks with you for the rest of your life. It makes you flinch at things that other people don’t. More than once I must have confused both my mother and old girlfriends when I was compelled to wriggle out of hugs and physical contacts by panic. I felt unlovable. I felt like a monster. And for a lot of that time, I didn’t know why. But it is a novel critical for me to write. Pain needs to become art in order to completely go away. I need to imprison the feelings and ideas in a book.
I am now at the point in that novel where I must write the scenes at the crisis point, the high point of the action, and I have to control the flinching. I have to control the reactions I could so easily fall into. It is critical that I get the scene right. The success or failure of the whole novel is at stake.
I have played it over and over in the cinema in my head a thousand times… several thousand times. It is difficult. But it is there. Soon I will have it down, crystallized in words. It make take considerable time to publish it, though, because editing it will be at least as hard as writing it. And I seriously have to get it right.
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Filed under commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, horror writing, monsters, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Tagged as The Baby Werewolf