Distracted
31 July 2011 06:41 AM Categories: Writing prompts
This week has been a bad one for writing. Everything has layers and requires more work than 12 minutes, more time to be thought out. The old stuff, the bad stuff, comes more easily but writing about it is a sham, like going back to my old high school decades after graduating. Everything is smaller, not true to memory, and the teachers are different and they painted the lockers a darker shade of blue. The guy who called the vice principle a corpulent bovine is working on Wall Street and my friend with the dyed black hair, the one I probably should have kissed at least once, who turned me on to Steve Albini’s band Big Black, teaches graduate students in conservative Arizona about the ways of corporations, the world of finance.
Therapy has rendered my creative mind useless. That and spending every day organizing things, tossing out this, boxing up that (this isn’t metaphorical, unfortunately, though the house is looking better and my son’s room is improving incrementally from a hoarder’s paradise to a place where we can see the floor). Yesterday was all about birthday party preparation, the house cleansing, the frosting whipping, the cake baking, the Chex mix roasting, the goody bag stuffing.
So I could write about my aching muscles, the way I sweated and gasped through the kettle bell workout and through the Berkeley Bowl shove, through the vacuum pushing and the dust rag dampening and the hot stove slaving. I finally sat down after 8 p.m. to organize the goody bags and then it was up to read 3.5 pages of Martin Amis’s Money (my third reading of the book. He’s so good.) before collapsing in a beery puddle.
Then … then! One of the cats went on a one a.m. tear and the dog barked to be let up the stairs at three (I’d closed the door to the stairs in error) and the boy came into bed at 3:30, all cold hands smoothed on my belly and back. Up at four, asleep again until 5:20, and then the stumble, the rumble of heat and my belly and the thoughts about what needs to happen before one p.m. today. It’s life, it’s dull, and so is my brain. And the tension, the tightness in my core, just doesn’t let up.
The image was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Jane Underwood, of the Writing Salon.
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