Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Morning Minutia


Make a pot of tea. Check email, respond to email. Check the weather forecast, rain and snow are coming. Put up the kitchen shades and look at the sky. Tea has steeped, pour a cup. Check election results and thank goodness for four more years of intelligent leadership. Take butter out of refrigerator to soften. No email from Amazon that the order has shipped. Check status. Status is “Shipping Soon.” Soon is a relative term. Give the cat a rub. Give R a kiss and a squeeze and wish her a good day. And drive carefully. Pour another cup of tea, make toast. Put rest of shades up while eating toast. Drink a glass of milk, eat an apple. Take a shower. Floss teeth. Brush teeth. Take multivitamin. Get dressed. Do dishes. Start a load of laundry. Step into garage and wish car and motorcycle a good morning (in German). Remove cat hair and other detritus from black fleece with sticky roller. Whoever invented the sticky roller was thinking. Look at list of things to do. Three interviews. Check out the lineup of Kindles. Look at them all! Too many choices lead to confusion so I’ll stick with books. Make note to drive a Nissan Leaf. To write about. Check local dealer inventory. No Leafs. Or Leaves? Take laundry from washer. Put shirts in the dryer for a few minutes. Spread the rest out on the drying rack. Pull shirts from dryer and put on hangers. Make another cup of tea. Email arrives from Amazon, order has shipped and should be here Friday. Good. Give the cat another rub. Stare at blinking cursor.

All the while the notion the next Great American Novel is in me, gnaws at me. Oh yeah, greatness. But I have no idea what the heck to say, so I occupy / distract myself with the minutia. And hope the words come. Another morning is going by. This is how it is being a writer. How all the great books got written is a mystery to me. It is one weird line of work.

Gordon Bunker