wilderworks

I had a very nice date. She probably didn't. Hi, have we met? I'm an idiot. I felt very cloudy. I'm not sure what I said. I felt like I was losing her attention. I couldn't get her to open up more than once or twice, and yet, I felt rather comfortable with her, looking in her eyes, which is rare. Very rare. I do so much better with women I'm not interested in. When I first got there, the restaurant she'd suggested was closed. So very closed, I imagined it was out of business. This was a prank. I walked up and down the street, in the rain, with my duck-head umbrella, hoping I wasn't getting stood up, almost certain I was. This was a mean prank. I sat in the car listening to NPR. At 8PM, Talk of the Nation started -- the show whose transcripts I spend two hours a day checking for errors. I got out to check for her one last time, and there she was. I closed the door, and locked my keys in the car. Alli earned her keep and brought me the spare set o...

I have an image in my mind. It is me, writing. It's strange. I have glasses in it. I'm at a desk, turning over sheets of paper. I think I'm writing in pencil, and the paper has a thick tooth, almost as rough as denim in my mind. I wrote an episode of Darwin's Kids, in college, in a single night, all on paper like that, with a pencil. It was the Jan Term episode. In the vision, I'm not sure what I'm wearing. I don't know what time of day it is, the light is neither blue nor bronze. Not sure where I am. The camera's looking up at such an angle, I can't see the chair or the desk, or anything but the colorlessness of an out-of-focus ceiling. But what's so romantic about this image is... I'm totally absorbed. I'm just writing. How can I get there? How can I shut up the stress, the expectations, the commercial/success imperative? How can I write something passionately, freely, without the critics and the critiques hovering an...