March 11
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

It seems silly to say that I've had writers block, because it's like, if I can't write down boring little stories about my life, what the hell CAN I do?  I mean, I have no pressing desire to call myself A Writer.  I'm not working on a book, a screenplay, a fanzine of poems.  I just live my life and hopefully tell a funny tale every now and then, and that's usually good enough.  Is is good enough, except when March is neverending, and it's still winter cold in Connecticut and I am afraid that I am losing my very tenuous grip on everything around me.  I am at once bored and overwhelmed by everything.  This isn't the kind of mood that lends itself well to wacky stories about The Reamer, Angelo or anything else.

A few years ago, at the very end of March a guy from one of the labs and I were walking in the same direction down the hall and we fell in step. "Did you hear it was going to snow again?!"  he asked, innocently.  I lost my mind.  I snapped at him with such bile, his eyes widened and he lagged a few steps behind me.  I apologized, but didn't really mean it.  After a long, nasty winter the gleeful reporting of yet another shitty snowstorm was not the thing to say to me.  Of course, he had no way of knowing that my mental stability was so precarious.

That is exactly how I feel now, and it's impossible to determine whether or not it's all about the weather: how I haven't seen a flower growing from the ground yet, how the trees aren't budding and the snow isn't melting and I wake in the morning afraid to look out the window because there's no way in hell I'm going to like what I see.  People are mean to one another on the streets.  Behind the wheel.  On the phone.  I am just as guilty.  The east coast is awash in some pre-war, neverending winter mentality.  When I hear of people in other parts of the country, "Oh, we wore shorts!" "I took a nightly constitutional with my best gal, and we were sweating in our windbreakers!!"  "I went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico!"  I want to throw a punch.  There is still snow in our weather forecast.  That makes my insides bubble over with anger at no one and everyone around me.  It makes me want to crawl under my covers and not crawl back out until the end of May.

Truly, there are better, less selfish reasons to feel furious with the world all the time, and yet at this very moment, I can not think of one.   I'm pretty sure that if you wait around, I'll think up a few.  In the mean time, hang tight.
 
 
 

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