Wanted: Plane, Ship or Flying Dinosaur (Or Why I Am Blogging Again)

I used to have a forest, but I can’t find it.  Before, to enter, all I had to do was stare at a wall really, really hard.  And sooner or later, I would come across someone I’ve never met.  Once it was this man whose job was to extract memories from small, everyday possessions.  (Whether he extracted memories to help amnesiacs or solve crimes hasn’t been revealed yet.)  Then I met this little kid whose mom died.  Only, she doesn’t seem to know, because she pops into the classroom of one of the teachers in her school, and everytime she comes she is bearing a gift.  So sure is she that this teacher looks just like her mother, and that they are one and the same.  My forest was a forest of voices.

Perhaps I’m losing it because I spend days and days editing the same text for the same product.  I write a lot too, but I write about the same thing.  So now I’m afraid that too much time spent on rules of style and grammar have pruned and swept and manicured my mind—and now I’m left with a proverbial hedge along a sidewalk.  Oh, I still hear voices, but I want them all to shut up, because they all belong to me.

And those voices I am losing, I haven’t heard their whole stories.  All I see is the hedge and the sidewalk, and I’m afraid that I’ll never walk a woody, overgrown path again, to bump into the man extracting memories and the kid bearing gifts.  I’d love to sit with them and chat, but they came to me in dreams, or while I was at the supermarket, picking out shampoo and toothpaste.  Who knows where they live?

Perhaps I wasn’t any fun to chat with, because (le gasp) repeatedly I brushed them away, busy figuring out if chief of staff is hyphenated (no), if spaces should come before and after an em dash (no) and if the em space is any bigger than no space at all (yes).*  So now I am stuck with a few repetitive voices, all mine, and I would rather listen to anything but them: They tell me that I ought to be creating spreadsheets for my budget, chant that I’m slowly but steadily going through the seven deadly sins, and suggest that maybe, just maybe, I should drink a nice gallon of vodka, and perhaps find a roomy oven to stick my head in.

And so, I promised to just string one sincere word after another.  Maybe, after pages and pages of them, I would have enough to weave into a plane, a plane of words.  Or a giant drill, a ship, or a flying dinosaur.  Anything to get out of the straight and narrow and into the forest, with its unknown monsters.  And we can live creatively and prolifically ever after.

*Notice to my employer: Not that I don’t enjoy my work—truly, I do.  But a chat with a man who can give you a video of your first kiss by scraping a bit of the material off your old tube of lipstick—that beats proofreading company brochures, everytime.