So, I haven’t written much lately. Which - if you’re like me and check other peoples’ blogs once a week or so in search of interesting tidbits - you already know. Maybe I’ve had a bad case of what they call writer’s block. Like the brain cells that ought to have gone zooming down to the publishing department got locked up in a traffic jam. Maybe I’ve been too busy being creative in other areas besides writing - like wood burning. Now that’s fun. Maybe it’s just a combination of gray winter days and not enough m&m’s.
Whatever the problem, I’ve decided to write again. Got inspired, you could say. By being sick. For an entire week, I was pretty much dead to the world. They could have assassinated the president and changed the colors of our flag, and I don’t think I would have known. Not that I wasn’t reading. But my books were a little more on the classical/historical fiction side. Zane Grey, Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, and the like. I’m pretty sure I went through five books in a week. Which can be a bit dangerous for a person with an over-active imagination. Kinda like handing a double-shot espresso to a kid with ADD.
Which may be why I was sitting downstairs at 11:00 at night imagining a masked stranger with an ax standing in the shadows of the next room. Or why I was trying to decide how to word my will while I was stretched out on the couch with a stubborn fever. I finally abandoned all my ideals about anti-medicine and 7-up-cures-everything and took myself to see the doctor. In 25 years of living, I’d never been to the doctor because I was sick.
I walked into the medical facilities with those tales of poisoned drinks and unnamed desert terrors racing through my mind (remember the ADD kid with the caffeine overload?) and imagined I might never come out. It was probably some undiscovered, incurable disease that would leave the doctors scrambling and me in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV for months - maybe years.
Turns out my throat was red. That’s what the doctor said. “Your throat’s red. Here’s some antibiotics.” Five minutes later, I was back in my car, clutching a prescription and wondering how “months-maybe-years” in a hospital bed could fly by so fast. So much for my best-selling how-to book on amusing yourself while dangerously ill. Talk about anti-climatic. Guess it’s back to the m&m’s and double-shot espressos for me. There’s gotta be an easier way to find inspiration.
