You May Already Be a Winner

Ever since I popped the cork on my first bottle of Red Clay Bestiary brand premium ink and selected a couple thousand words pertaining to, if memory serves, muscadine grapes, subsequently scratching them upon a fresh sheet of foolscap like a large cat trying to bury a particularly aromatic turd, I’ve been wondering when this day would come. The day upon which, for whatever reason, I would peer into the the coffee can where I keep my words to find it empty. I’ve fought quite a bit with myself to avoid that day, which has resulted in feats of frantic writing and possibly also a bit of dross, for which I apologize, but to be quite honest I don’t just write this stuff for your entertainment. No, much as I love each and every one of you I also write for myself, and part of the purpose of this project is to force myself to meet a regular deadline. If you know me at all you’ll be aware that time doesn’t really mean all that much to me, and things that take most people a day or two can occasionally take me a decade or more. So, hitting a fortnightly target is for me like playing music with a metronome. Has either done me any good? I have no idea, but they tell me it does, so I’m in.

Until today, that is. I’ve always reckoned that I’d fail to deliver under one of two circumstances: either I’d just run out of stuff to write about and find myself spewing fountains of verbiage about the magic of vegetable peelers or unleaded gasoline and, sickened by my frivolity I’d wind up joining a monastery. Or, I’d find myself the victim of circumstance. I think this is the latter case.

I’m writing this in a motel in Crowly, Louisiana. Over the last couple days I have been assisting in the celebrations of Cajun Mardi Gras—I have eaten frog legs and captured a chicken with my bare hands, and I have consumed an unhealthy amount of beer. I’ve done all of this in the service of the written word, but right now I’ve got a million of them, as yet unwritten, and they are bouncing around inside my head like lotto balls. We do not yet have a winner.

I think we will though—a couple winners I hope. I’ll send whatever sprouts from this soil when it’s done. I think you’ll get a kick out of it. I certainly have.