I looked at the email from N Meador, unwilling to consider what it asked me to do. It was late and I had been in the bottle for a few hours and was close to sleep or a blackout, whichever came first. I stumbled up the stairs and laid down in bed, my woman was already fast asleep and she was throwing off lots of heat. Spring was beginning too warm and the creek across the road was now full of frogs which croaked loudly all night long and it was a nice chorus to listen to as I slipped into oblivion. My gut was shredded and my ears were still warm from the blues music I was listening to earlier. The email was lingering in my head all night as I fully intended to make a contribution to the website. It was just that lately I had taken to running a screw gun and hanging fluorescent lights in my new workshop. I had only destroyed one bulb the whole time and I believe I had drained an entire box of beer and most of a bottle of Cabernet. The email stuck to me because I was once again acting like a writer in my own mind while actually writing nothing. It's true I wrote a little thing about hasps and one about caterpillars in an oil puddle but nothing worth a shit. It had recently occurred to me that most of the writers I saw on the computer were carrying on about their prowess with the juice and few if any of us seemed to know why the hell we were actually writing. The booze seemed to be some recurring ocean that some of us were sailing our words upon. Meanwhile N Meador is completely thoughtful and welcoming of good ideas while I have abused his goodwill and taken to living like a latter day Dean Martin, minus the stage and fat wallet.
So there I laid almost down for the count when I thought of this title. Perhaps it was a flashback to some long lost coach from my childhood or maybe it was my own inner drill sergeant provoking me but the damn thing stuck and I swore to make a go at it. With a renewed vigor I considered my angle. Why all the booze? Why all the words? Why are they mashed together in this dumb habit? It must be a lack of guts I concluded. A lack of serious chance taking. Writers are full of ideas that aren't easily coaxed out. Even if they are some of the biggest bigmouths that their friends have even known. So when I began to realize that the story of the green rod of light in the yard came to me while I was actually sharing the sight with someone else, I seemed to have an epiphany. Now I'm sitting here with an awful TV show blinking idiocy in the background and I know damn well that I saw a green radioactive light in the grass in the front yard last night when the power was out. My son saw it, so did my wife. We fixated on it, calling it at first a glob of lightning bugs. It faded out like lightning bugs do. We thought it was a downed power line and the lady on the phone from the power company told us not to investigate as we could be electrocuted. So we watched as the Giant Edison truck drove slowly up and down our isolated dirt road with a spotlight looking for the breach of current flow. We watched and heard a strange sound in the woods across the street which we figured must be alien or at the very least turkey related. We became bored with our discoveries and went back to bed slightly before 5:00 a.m. When I walked the dog at 6:30 I made sure to investigate the exact spot where we had seen the green thing. I found an enormous Earthworm in what I believed was the exact spot. It was amazing lying there fat and wet in the morning dusk. I quickly reached down for it but it quickly disappeared. The little dog took a crap and we went back into the house.
You the reader should know that I would have never gotten to tell you about the green rod in the grass if I were loaded. Instead I would have parlayed the precursory tale into a diatribe about the failures of writers in general, how your better off avoided people like me, as if I am invited over, I may at first seem perfectly charming and even well versed but add a bit of go juice and watch me ravage your flowerbeds with an watery mix of stomach acid and freshly consumed fried food, it can get ugly, especially if a cat or pet dog happens along to enjoy my contribution to the earth. Perhaps I vomited that green blob in the grass? It was witnessed, so I have my story whether I left it there or the Green Electric Turkey from the Sombrero Galaxy left it. My point in all this seems to be running away from me at a record pace but if I recall it revolved around the need to focus and write a solid piece. Our power outage was not going away so quickly and we soon found ourselves without the sizzle again. This time it was full daylight and I was only half awake from staying up all night peering into our grass at the glob from the aforementioned distance that the Edison lady had prescribed. "Whew this is exhausting work," I thought. My kid went off to school and I once again tried to lie down for a little rest. Now, in the morning the bed was cool and we actually pressed ourselves up against each other to generate warmth. I wasn't romantic but at least it helped us get some rest. More importantly I sat down to write this out a scant 18 hour later. I suppose this is more a tale of how this piece came to exist than it is an actual story with a chronological flow of the events mentioned. What impressed me was that I did remember to come in here sober and tell a tale...where is my chip? Awe no chip for 18 hours? We have no idea what we were looking at last night. I'm not a kook and I'm a huge skeptic of any thing other than this apparent death march that the human race seems to be engaged in. what was it? Who knows? But I do know this. Here I am writing it all down again at an awkward hour, alone in the spare room on this awful computer. This seems to be my claim to fame, not the amount of booze I've dumped down my gizzard, not the careful glance I should give things of great importance and if that green glob of shit turns out to be anything of real importance I will surely tell you what I have found out about it.
After this many hours I have found that the keyboard is not the friend of the insomniac nor does a green glob constitute an actual alien invasion and even though I am not once again sauced, I am at the very least in a similar glow stage relative to what I saw on my front lawn. My witnesses are sleeping and I am going there soon,if luck is in my corner.
|
