His wife needed new shoelaces. Only one store in town sells replacement laces.
He realized that finding shouldn’t surprise him. When he was a child, it was commonplace to snap a shoelace, forcing imaginative knotting to keep your shoe tied. In these times, the shoes usually wore out before the laces. His wife’s laces were for new shoes; she wanted white laces instead of the stripped ones that came with her shoes. Yes, it is a little first world pain, isn’t it?
A paragraph of muses arrives.(Maybe it should be a page of muses, or a book (a tome?) of muses.)
Writing begins. The story soon rises from the mind’s mists.
Sticky writing becomes prominent, exhausting and intense. Sticky writing, the condition where the ‘normal’ world – the real world – seems unreal and distant, even artificial and alien, because what’s being created in the writing sticks to your mind. Real world observations and interactions are colored, distorted, and isolated by the writing in progress. The writing effort pushes the real world out.
Becoming part of the RW again was going to challenge his mind. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be part of it. What choice was there? It was real life, not the made-up world of his book.
Viafloof (floofinition) – An activity or function modified to include an animal when animals were not normally involved.
In use: “His routines included a viafloof when he left the office and went into other parts of the house, no matter where or the reason, checking on the cats and dogs’ status and location, reassuring him that his floofs were safe and well.”
The Tucker floof awoke me with song at an early time. “Get up, get up, it’s time to eat. Get up, get up, no time to sleep. Get up, get up, feed me some food. Get up, get up, or I’ll keep up this tune.”
Which he did. So I did. That makes this Mewsday.
The sky crashed down on his last night. Well, starting just after two in the afternoon, winds shifted, bringing the Rum Creek fire‘s smoke right down the I-5 corridor, changing the color of our air quality indicators from green to red like a traffic signal at work. Although it looks and smells better today, we’re at 152, red, and not good. Actually, the peculiarities of the narrowing valley and slope that I live on brings the air quality down to a more endurable 105. A wind shift can take that away, making us like the rest of the city.
Sunrise was a mellow and uneventful period at 6:33 AM. Sunset cometh at 7:50 PM. Cool 54 F now but a high of 34 C is on deck.
Got a Tom Petty song in mind. Heard it on the radio the other day. The Neurons said, “We like this,” and kept it on as background music in the mental music stream since. The song is “Leave Virginia Alone”. I remember hearing the Rod Stewart version back in 1995. Didn’t move me deeply. I was unaware that Tom Petty wrote it, learning that later, when he covered it himself. It sounds more like a Tom Petty style song than a Rod vehicle to me.
Okay, where is the coffee, please? The cats have abandoned me. Tucker is silent and coffee is needed. Stay positive, test neggy, etc. Have a good Monday, whatever that means on your spectrum. Here’s the song. A little mellow for a coffee-less Monday to my ears but it makes The Neurons happy. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 