Delete Button - Reboot

Therapy

What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own.

What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds….

My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot.

I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse!

I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety.

Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have.

I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind.

Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea.

So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually…

My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up.

What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together.

Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart.

Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me.

Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use.

The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it.

Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that.

I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months.

At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now.






Synced
What shall I disturb myself with now? I was…
12 Pages | 2,974 Words | 0 Today

What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own.

What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds….

My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot.

I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse!

I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety.

Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have.

I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind.

Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea.

So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually…

My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up.

What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together.

Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart.

Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me.

Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use.

The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it.

Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that.

I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months.

At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now.






Synced
What shall I disturb myself with now? I was…
12 Pages | 2,974 Words | 0 Today

What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own.

What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds….

My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot.

I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse!

I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety.

Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have.

I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind.

Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea.

So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually…

My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up.

What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together.

Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart.

Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me.

Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use.

The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it.

Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that.

I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months.

At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now.