Text Thomas Lloyd Qualls Photo Kelly Peyton
A Probability of Words Someday Words. Some days it’s like this. You’d rather do just about anything other than write. Go pick out the new ladder you’ve needed for months, finally buy a shop vac, hand water your outdoor plants, rearrange your office furniture, go for a bike ride, clean the grill, cut your fingernails, check your Facebook page, again. And still part of you knows you’d really rather be writing than anything else. If you could just start putting words on the page. If you could somehow find the courage, patience, stillness, cone of silence, to write that first sentence, fragment, title, word. Sometimes you may just chicken out and just move straight to editing. Moving around words that are already there and trying to pretend it’s the same thing. Though you know it isn’t. Or the flow gets interrupted by some random thought, phone call, text message, memory, shiny thing, sudden erotic fantasy. And then it may take you the better part of an hour to make your way back to the flow. Or it may just be gone. Evaporated into the ether to go become condensation on some other writer’s water glass
back every other nagging critic telling you there are other responsibilities that need tending to. And still, you hover.
So you allow yourself another espresso. Fuel for the journey, you tell yourself, for probably the thousandth time. And though you know it’s a half-truth, you do it anyway. And you’re not sure if it will actually help. And you feel guilty, and whip yourself the whole way there and back, but you do it all the same. And you’ll do it again. You know the best bet is to start first thing. Someplace where there aren’t friends to talk to or other chores to nag at you. You know the lie you tell yourself otherwise -- that you’ll just clear some things off your desk first, and then you’ll write – has never been true before. But each day is new, and so you believe this time Lucy won’t snatch the football at the last minute. That you’ll be able to connect with the ball, to cleanly deliver a true kick through the goal posts.
Some days it’s like this.
And when, lying flat on your back in the grass with your head pounding, you find yourself sometime after noon not having written any actual words, you’ll resolve again to get up and get straight to work. There’s still half a day left, after all.
You start with the best of intentions. Or even a bad cliché. But you are conscious of how precious the time is. And you resolve to beat
And on those days when you do sit right down, where the words are there and flowing and real, and all feels right with the universe, and all the
6 Reno Tahoe Tonight