I am a woman in labor of thought, constantly awaiting arrival. I slam the dishwasher closed and make myself some toast, needing to hear that self soothe of liquid and dish churning to understand what it is I want to say. What am I saying? I don't know what to say.
I’m a stay-at-home/writerperson/stock girl at Nordstrom trying to keep my head on straight and not sleep during the day. I've turned nocturnal in less than a week; its wretched. It's given me a head cold.
Like today, sick as a dog, I have this unexplainable mission to make a tuna casserole. Tuna casserole, for myself. Right. Like somebody died or had a baby or something.(Maybe its for my labor of thought?) The entire heaping dish of it: for me.
It's sitting on my stove now and I'm just glaring at it.
Not sleeping makes a person do strange things.
Like wanting to start a blog called "Simon Says" but my name's not Simon. That kind of weird, stupid stuff.
So back to the dishwasher I go, for inspiration for calm, maybe for a nap bedding down next to it like my dad always does. On his lunch break, zonked out under the dishwasher, or on the dryer, like that dog from Charlie Brown that sleeps on top of his dog house. Nobody gets it. I guess they don't have to.
Dads are strange, but I find myself suspended in the gravitational force field of my dishwasher too, but not for a nap, for a damn good "something" to write about. All I get is tuna casserole and Simon Says.
Imagine that. If dad's are weird, their daughters are certainly more so.
Take this paragraph Anne Lamott wrote about her dad, the writer, who she grew to be very alike it seems:
"Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill."
At times I feel like that mentally ill writer, despairing that my words won't be enough and I become hyper-self conscious when people ask what I do, like I work for the freaking CIA or something and can't tell them. With my insecurities compounding, I say: well, I write books, yes both my own and other people's. Or I'm a ghostwriter, which sounds more like a rogue agent. I only pull that one out for special occasions.
One thing I like to do is chatter away on my computer keys especially when someone needs help taking the garbage out or doing yard work and looking at them like I'm about to crack the human genome or and saying: "I....am working." And they say nothing and I think to myself, huh. That worked. That might classify me as a miserable person, and if so, I'm right on track to becoming an excellent writer.
