eah, the cat. She’s hanging in there but it’s a heart-ripper all the same.
Years back, I wrote every day at work. I actually wrote Indigoin my lunch breaks, and a lot of the half-way Tubitz and Mergenstein, as well. I’ve knocked out a number of erotic collections (yeah, for sale, and dollars legitimizes anything in America) – how strange to write about heaving sweaty bodies, her fingers reaching down to play him and coax him until he was as hard as a ram, while at the next table over a woman grinds at her kids on her cell for not doing their SAT homework. Many of my seventeen years at this corporation have been spent writing.
Jogging took our the first hit on it – I started jogging with others here to get ready for the Corporate 5k. That has gone on for years now, and people being people, they all dropped out. Now it’s just me with my water bottle and cell phone jogging down the tree-lined corporate-park road (where yuppies in beamers fly so fucking fast), knocking out a couple of miles three noons a week. The leaves two days for writing.
And now the cat.
Even when I do find time, when there isn’t a lunch meeting, brown-bagger (or time-waster), there is the mood issue. My heart is leaden. I just don’t feel like writing. I’ve brought my laptop to write something – short stories or state-of-mind pieces, and munched a sandwich and stared at that white screen of virgin word. Nothing. It’s not writer’s block – I don’t get writer’s block. But I do think it’s depression. And I don’t get it because I am able to write (irony alert – I’m doing it now). But this is a duty, to my DOG EAR commitment, and that provides reason and motive enough. But fun writing, pleasure writing, the stuff that I used to do every lunch, writing five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes past back-to-the-desk time, that’s gone. The flame seems extinguished. I can’t find my heart.
It’s really just enough to get home and hug my frail wasted cat and try not to cry. But writing for the joy and contentment of the act? Can’t do it, not anymore.