We’re sitting in a brewery, something like eleven of us and a six-month-old with a unique first name. There are other babies here, and an overweight corgi limping toward the exit with its dog-mom.
It’s open and airy and not too crowded. Behind a set of closed doors is a side gig of sorts. We learn that a wrestling match will start in thirty minutes, and we watch all kinds of characters in tights walk past us into that other room.
I ask one friend, who I know self-publishes, “What are you writing lately?”
He says it’s a “sort-of sci-fi mystery.” A woman is lost in the desert and stumbles across an ice cream stand, and he tells me the gruesome catch: she gets sucked into the machine, her body churning with the soft serve.
I say, with bright eyes, “How do you come up with your stories? Are they dreams first?”
What kind of sci-fi mystery would I write, if I let myself stretch outside of the “write what you know” shtick. He asks me what I’m writing lately.
“Crap.” I say, with a smile. “I mean, I have a love story I’m writing. But it’s made up of letters I can’t quite get right and hasn’t someone already done that better?”
“Someone’s always gonna do it better.” He shrugs, his eyes gentle and amused behind his glasses.
When we decide our hang is over, despite the sun going down, it’s still hot and muggy outside. We have to get into my Fiat through the passenger side because there are deep, filthy puddles near the driver’s side.
“Careful not to wipe out the wrestlers behind you,” N says, and sure enough, there they are. Three fantastically and colorfully dressed dudes, smoking directly behind us.
We drive home to my music, and I think of the window I sometimes crawl through, to write.
It’s usually only cracked open. But sometimes it’s thrown wide and it’s thrilling. Part of the thrill is its temporariness. The intrigue lives in the impermanence of it. I never can guess when it will close and I’ve often tried to force it open to no one’s enjoyment.
(Daily Writing 069)
Thoughts?