Dear Reader,
Word Raccoon woke me up at five o’clock this morning. I’m beginning to suspect she simply wanted a longer writing day.
The little scamp.
We spent a few hours at the café this morning, arriving just as they were opening though we hadn’t even noticed we were so early, and somewhere between Coke Zero and eavesdropping, four poems wandered onto the page. One called “I Told the Bees.” Another involved mushrooms: “Just Today.” The third featured big box store roses and receipts, which is not a sentence I expected to write when I woke up this morning. The last I called “J. Peterman-Years-Old.”
Then, because WR apparently hadn’t caused enough trouble already, she decided she might need to write an entire chapbook inspired by clothing. Someone should probably hide my debit card before I accidentally buy a silk jacket with a backstory. (Although, would that be so wrong?)
Do you suppose the Theory of Everything can also be applied to poetry? Maybe that’s what we literary folk call Intertextuality. They’re kinda one and the same. Like my poems, the next haunted by the last. If that makes any sense. I think my biggest fear is that they will all begin to blur, all sound the same note over and over, like a fly buzzing.
Nobody wants that.
Side quest (it’s this damn Dungeon Crawler Carl book I’m reading):
At the café, I mentioned to the barista that I was envious because my coffee partner had ordered the peanut butter berry bowl yesterday, and I hadn’t. So naturally, I ordered one today.
“I asked (her coworker) if she knew who she was serving yesterday,” she said.
My head bowed demurely. Word Raccoon and I briefly prepared to receive our inevitable admiration with all the humility we could muster. Yes, being an author in a small town sometimes comes with recognition.
Except…
She was talking about my new friend. (I hope I’m not being presumptuous calling her that, but I feel like we really hit it off.) Apparently, she’d been on a season of a nationally televised show.
Reader, I laughed at myself so hard.
Naturally, I texted her to report what I’d overheard. She was more humble than Word Raccoon by far.
The rest of the day was decidedly less literary: gym, running the car through the wash, buying ice, and all those little tasks that make Future Me quietly grateful to Past Me.
Oh, and thrifting, where we found a few items of clothing but alas, no poems were hiding in any of the jacket pockets. WR offered to jump into one, but I told her I didn’t think that, small as she is, she could fit. You are a raccoon, not my poetry,” I told her as I patted the empty pockets.
I also received some encouraging lab results today. Nothing terribly exciting for anyone else, perhaps, but enough to remind me that small, consistent efforts eventually begin writing their own stories. My body is tolerating the arthritis medicine. (My life is so glamorous.)
Tonight: Dungeon Crawler Carl, book two – Carl’s Doomsday Scenario – and the satisfaction of a day with (some) poetry in it.
Until,
Drema
P.S. Do not tell Word Raccoon that her weekend at the dunes has just been postponed due to unhealthy air conditions. I’m going to break it to her over lunch and a movie with friends tomorrow. She’s definitely going to demand Twizzlers, I just know it!