Fear of Flying

This writing thing. Dreaming stuff up, getting it down, putting it together into something remotely coherent for the nonresidents of my brain. There is a stage of discipline in art, of making yourself forgo some fun stuff in order to sit in a chair (again) and type, of forming words and sentences and paragraphs. But there’s also some inchoate mass that has to have room—not beige or square please—and time to swirl and coalesce, break apart and broil and recoalesce into those ideas to which will be applied structure, cause and effect, and grammar.

The swirling part requires in me an unleashing of unadult impulses. I have a mortgage. I have kids. I have a color-coded appointment calendar. And today on a day that should have been filled with appointments, instead Taurus stalled in waning Mercury or something or other—it sure seems stellar not local—and the writer brain slithered loose of some of its bindings.

The standing playdate today required a phone call, which I missed because I quit answering the phone. The standing appointment I had moved to make room for an exercise class, and then forgot about it and missed that phone call too. When I went to do photocopy duty at Son1’s school, I found a locked door, and instead of looking for keys I found a sunny rock where I could sit and type.

The writer brain does not mark appointments down in colored pen. It isn’t just wild wolves, boys in the basement, Grecian muses eating peeled grapes. It sulks but also plays, screams, snarks, and flaunts an exemplary bling-bedripped diva. It’s why yes, I will have another. It’s passionate and obsessive, grabby, exotically generous, snap impulsive, hot, driven, mean, all in, fuck you yes please. Now now nownow.

And I cannot type fast enough or check out long enough, or if I really do walk right up to the edge, will I be able to keep from jumping? And next time?

I am practiced at putting away the absinthe, putting on the khakis, setting up timers to bing me into the next color-coded event. I practice flipping these switches the other direction as well; I’ve eked out more free corners for the fictional complications where I spend my daydreams. But the muse does not do clocks neither eking and, I fear, is suspicious.

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