It’s Easier When I’m Making it Up

I’m telling you guys, it’s obnoxious, I know, to hear writers go on about how hard writing is and so on.  This isn’t that.  Just that the second book, the one about how things went to shit right about when I was getting a handle on getting them in order, and kept on going back to shit every time I kept on getting them back in order, it’s not going to be easy or fun to write.  I haven’t even written myself out of the ICU, that time when I almost died, and — well, anyway, this: from what I understand, emotions work a bit like article tags, or maybe more like priority markings for emails and such, telling yer mind what to remember and ordering the whole thing.  When they get summoned, though, it’s not like doing a Google search but I wish it were.  That line there, between description and invocation, it’s not as clear as I think it should be.  So when I get up on this writing–and having all of a sudden been thrust back into extreme career uncertainty, yet again, despite doing a pretty damned good job at what I do, on the one hand it threatens my ability to keep the momentum going and, on the other hand, might give me the old screaming terrors that will get me going on it (because, you know, writing fiction is a solid career move)–it’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’m not at all sure I’m equipped to deal with at the moment.  But I’ve been saying that for a little over five–no, make that six, sweet Jebus–for six years, thinking some day I’d get some repose, and the only time I had enough repose to get a book done, it was because everything had gone so emphatically to shit that writing a novel was the least bad option for ways to spend my time.  So I don’t know, man, but I’m real worried about what happens when I finish with the episode that wasn’t my fault and get on to others where it’s not nearly as clear.

Anyway, even though there are a couple other posts there waiting to be finished, since I can’t, I don’t think, both blog and write on the same day, this is just a hello, and a picture, from about two weeks after the time I almost died, when me and my mom and dad took everyone–and my, there were a lot of people–who’d pulled shifts getting me to the hospital, staying with me, helping my parents get around Seoul and so on, when we took them out to dinner shortly before heading back to the U.S.  For what it’s worth, one of my sister’s friends, out in the western wilds of central Indiana, called me a hottie not two weeks after this picture was taken.  To my knowledge, that’s the first and only time that word was ever associated with me, though my ex-wife used to tell me she thought I looked damn good then, after losing 22 lbs in 10 days (and starting from about 30 or so below where I am now, but then I didn’t have these here guns).

Anyway, it’s all just hard to figure, is all, so I’m going out for a walk.