Scooby Snacks (DOG EAR)
Scooby Snacks (DOG EAR)
kay, so it’s a bit of a misuse of the phrase. Scooby Snacks were given to Scooby Doo, the dog, and Shaggy, the late-bloomer cowardly hippy, as rewards and courage-enhancers. The term I’m looking for here are the more traditional doggie snacks in cartoons that would make the hound vault straight up into the air, then come leafing down in a state to total bliss, they were so good. But “Doggie Snacks” wouldn’t get you in here, but a reference to “Scooby Doo” would. And here you are.
So, what was the point of this?
The point is writers’ bliss, that moment when something you do makes you fly into the air and then come drifting down, smiling a goofy smile, totally coked on stoke in a way that would make conservatives enact even more laws. Yeah. Ahhhhhhh!
All I can saw was that Monday at work was bad. I had a bunch of stuff going. People quibbled about the smallest things. They just sat at their desk like petulant children refusing to eat strained peas, arms crossed, harrumph. And I was mayflying about from place to place, getting things moving forward, shouldering through the shitstorm of insults (directed or otherwise). Nothing like standing in an office and having someone gush about how well my nemesis is doing with an effort he corncobbed me out of. I actually openly winched at that – the guy saw it and asked if I was having problems with another kidney stone. Well, metaphysically, yes.
It was a day to test men’s souls, and to make them reconsidered their own early retirements.
Yeah, Early Retyrement – just as we were reaching shit-summit, just as the nonsense was at a crescendo of stupidity, I ducked into Facebook just to sip the idiocy of politics and theology (rather than that of corporate compliance). And that’s when I got the message from my niece. She’d finally gotten around to reading my novel and really liked it. She had started sniffing through it and ended up plowing through in two days. The fact that a young person (relationship or otherwise) would take time to press through three hundred or so pages is pretty extraordinary. Non-writers would assume that your friends, family and coworkers would happily read your books. Turns out its never quite true – I can still see a dusty copy of my book on someone’s desk at work, tucked in between Excel 2003 and The Fortran Toolkit.
But she read it. And she really liked it.
YOIKE! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
So there I am at my desk, just smiling as I remember some of the scenes she’d just enjoyed, of Mason creating a place for himself in the ancient world of Phoenicia with his knowledge of fast-food restaurants. And his parrot. And his girlfriend’s warhorse, the big black monster that Mason suspected shat coal. And she’d liked it. I’d made a connection with someone in a way that wasn’t transitory and asinine and bureaucratic – I’d told my story and someone had gotten it.
And that’s why we are writers, this legion of wannabe hacks who won’t be on Oprah anytime soon. That’s why we self-publish and self-promote and self-fail. Because every so often someone will read our works, enjoy our story and see our worlds. And thus, as I stood at the coffee pot pouring myself a cub of slurry, with some woman sputtering about missing Load Dates, I just looked at her. And smiled.
Ahhhhhhhhhh!