clouds in my coffee

    I think I've lost the ability to write prose. When I try, nothing comes. Worse than that, though, I rarely sit down to try, because of the feeling of nothing coming. Someone I used to care about very much (who incidentally taught me more about writing than anyone else in my life, and with whom I would also be in love, later) once told me, "It won't always feel like this. You'll get over it."

    Staring at him like a lunatic, I said, "Of course I don't believe that." He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow, as if to ask what I meant. "If I believed that it would get better, then I would be over it already, and I would not feel this way now."

    He and I were talking about a different subject, though. Whether I did get over that one is a different question (and remains a subject of contention). Will I get over this? I don't know. It's not for lack of subjects. I entertain people at work every day, just by recounting the email and Facebook communications that have come in since last I spoke with them. (Recent favorites: The Dirty Mormon Strikes Again; The Mystery Package; and The Guy Who Told Me He Loved Me 10 Minutes After Meeting Me "Winks" on OkC...after months of blissful silence.) I could write about the earthquake, which seems to be an object of amusement for some and a harbinger of doom for others (it's probably someplace in between, really). Or my recent brush with fame (an author read a review that I'd just posted to the work blog, and commented, from "the other side of the Pacific." The comment was the nicest thing I've read in a very long time, and it absolutely made my week--and thank God it was a good review!). Or my struggles with the blog and commenting (seriously, JS-Kit is the worst company EVER, and the powers that were at Haloscan ought to be very, very ashamed of themselves for cashing out. They'd had a good product, and they gave it up to something unworkable and the absolute height of user-unfriendly. The only thing that JS-Kit did right was to process a quick refund.) Or work...nah.

    But, really? All I want to do is sleep (still getting over the tonsillitis/sinus infection/cold from Hell that I picked up 2+ weeks ago), drink tea (you could float a destroyer in the tea I've drunk in the past month), and read. Currently cracked: Ten Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists (Richard T. Kelly), Breakwater: Poems (Catharine Savage Brosman), Autobiography of a Wardrobe (Elizabeth Kendall), Mozart's Third Brain (Göran Sonnevi), and Election (Tom Perrotta). In fact, if anybody needs me I'll be on the couch--with blackberry sage tea and the Kelly book.