Nothing Sadder Than a Blank Page

I've been staring at this big empty white rectangle for several hours now, and just like the meteor shower, if you stare unblinking at it long enough you can see stuff happening even if it's really not.

Stare into the sky of a hot, humid nighttime and teeny little dashes blip across the static sparkling stars- are they meteors? Or involuntary twitches of your eyeballs?

We call them meteors and go inside, itching the bites the mosquitoes have inflicted in spite of the bug repellent.

Stare at this big empty box long enough (and with a self-imposed deadline of a midnight posting) and words appear- most of them backspaced into oblivion before ever getting a chance at being seen by more than the author- and for that the reader may be thankful.

*Trust me*.

Most of the words that appear here are involuntary twitches that flash between my brain and my fingers, and most of them are gawdawful.

So they get backspaced and disappeared and I think "Yanno, maybe this whole 'writer' thing was just a phase and I need to take up something more my speed- like Afternoon Napping".

And I guess the problem is that nothing particularly post-worthy happened today.

Some mildly annoying, momentarily frightening, but not insurmountable things.

Some very good, very happy, "This is the sort of thing that will give me a warm fuzzy every time I think about it for the rest of my life" things.

Nothing huge in either direction.

Nothing to even piss me off just enough to get all worked up about.

No. Wait.

On Saturday Night Live, right now- Weekend Update with Seth Meyers just showed a map of Australia, a big-toothed reptile and the word "Alligator" underneath it.

Are you freakin' kidding me?

There are no Alligators in Australia. None. Not one. Zero. Those big-toothed reptiles in Australia are Crocodiles. Always have been. Always will be.

That's the sort of thing that makes me insane.

Remember the movie "Romancing the Stone"? It was a pretty good flick for its time.

Right at the beginning, when the bus carrying Kathleen Turner collided with Michael Douglas' jeep full of exotic birds he'd been collecting for the pet trade (wildly illegal btw) and they all flew the coop literally? And he explained the worth of the various kinds of birds- so much for a macaw, so much for a conure, so much for a sulphur- crested cockatoo?

Ruined the whole rest of the movie for me. On accounta there ARE no sulphur-crested cockatoos (or any other kind of cockatoo) in South America- THOSE are from Australia.

If you're going to cover a story- even in a pretend news show, or write something into a movie script, make sure you've got your facts straight.

Because there WILL be people out there who will catch it if you've tried to scrimp on fact finding.

We are watching. We are listening. And we will be pissed off by such slovenly research. Because life is messy enough without our entertainment being screwed up.

I mean, if we can't trust Seth Meyers and Saturday Night Live to deliver factual accounts of the weekly news in review, or the producers of a movie they purposely set in South America to find out what actually lives there, we may as well just give up all hope of seeing anything remotely resembling the real world and turn on FOX News.

Wow. Almost midnight.

That was a close one.

A Writer's Block Fairy Tale

Once Upon A Time there was a middle aged, frumpy hippiechick who typed words into a magical black box. Even though she was sitting deep in the beautiful Pineywoods of East Texas, through the wonder of the interwebs, these words flew up and out of the magic box, and wafted all over the world, settling into other magic black boxes and were (mostly) enjoyed by the (tiny) throngs of readers who followed her adventures.

Sometimes her words were humorous and made people laugh, sometimes they were sad and made people cry, alot of the time they were very angry and every so often they were words that get children's mouths washed out with soap.

One day the words stopped coming.

Just like that.

It had happened once before, when her husband was very ill and the words up till then had been all cheerful and humorous. For a long time she didn't feel funny, or happy, or even remotely fine.

She was sad, and worried, and the words were afraid to go near her.

At the time, she was so sad and worried, she didn't even notice.
At the time, she was so sad and worried, once she noticed, she didn't even care.

Now it seemed that the words were afraid again- even the bad ones.
And this time, she did notice, and she did care.

Not that there wasn't anything to write about- they had just had a little road trip and seen and done alot of neat stuff that could've used up some happy traveling words.

They were back at the cancer hospital for scans and rechecks and although her husband's graft looked great, he was still very thin and kind of weak and there was that annoying spot on his neck that refused to heal, so that could've used up some worried anxious words.

She was very tired and had spent the better part of the last few days driving, so that could've used up some exhausted maybe partially garbled up words.

Things at work had been stressful and needlessly awful and that could've used up some angry fed-up words.

The gardens were growing, the puppy was adorable, her son had done fabulously well at his tae kwon do tournament, and her husband was still and would always be her Knight in Shining Armor, so that could've used up some contented grateful words.

And they'd gotten some good news on the New House front- as well as some people who would hopefully fall in love with the Old House- positive and tangible moves forward in a part of their lives that had seemed to be spinning in circles forever, so that could've used up some hopeful cautiously optimistic words.

But instead, she sat at the magic black box and started first one story, then another, then another, and she proclaimed them all Stupid, and hit the Off With Their Heads Delete Key in disgust.

Finally she threw up (her hands in frustration), decided she was just too tired and had too many thoughts swirling around willy nilly hither and yon without any damn semblance of order in her mind causing all the words to scatter and stampede into nonsensical little twitchy clumps, and even though she had promised herself she would write something every few days and it was now beyond that by several days

she gave up.

The End.