Mermaladies

Thank you hjm and spaceneedl for burying my post-o-crap.

Not that I ever got rolling this summer with posts, but I haven't been able to enjoy writing for awhile now. Writing has been like another big love of mine, bodies of water, which I both crave and fear. I crave the soothing effects of a bubbling brook. Crashing waves, morning or night, of a temporal sea or the landlocked lake. Even a storm offshore can calm me. What I fear though is drowning. That and the sea monsters of the ocean depths keep my chest constricted. I can barely swim. Treading water is out of the question. Yet each summer I tell myself I'll conquer this fear. But as this summer closes, the fear remains. Perhaps, leaving this fear allows my love for water and writing to continue. The shared dichotomy is another story.

Another struggle that has been this summer is my toe-dipping with XHTML and CSS. I want to learn it. But I only go in so far before running back. When I finally dived into writing code without worry for ability to stay afloat, pretty much all writing ceased. Writing has been devoid of self-sustaining nourishment. And what with all the ocean horror flicks aired on cable this last month to scare me, like America I must learn how to swim with the monsters if the sea and let them have their space without feeling trapped by the freedoms of occupation. But that too is another story.

This morning (if 11 am can be called morning) I awoke to remember why I don't like to write. Code, that is. My literary creativity gets all shot to hell whenever I am submerged within computer languages. Happened as a kid. Happened in college. Happened in work. Happens now. And coding keeps me from getting sound sleep. If it were not for the side-effects of poor sleep, I'd write code for a living. Last night lasted until 5:30 this morning. Upon falling asleep it was all I could do to not dream of shifting CSS DIVs emptying their content -- overflowing onto the background and then off the screen -- twisting and spiraling like the underwater horror scenes from the Wizard of Oz. What's that? No such scenes? Ahh, but had you visited the cutting room floor in your childhood nightmares as I did you'd be hearing me sing an octave or two off-key my styling of "If only I had a muse."

HJM, I think my muse dumped me for your muse, which also may be why you see that extra hop in her step. ;) FWIW, I've been all over the map with cellular service and I always return to SprintPCS.

Spaceneedl, after reading your Sunday post, I may or may not publish something similar in two weeks, the three-year anniversary of the day I beached the shores of Seattle. Wish I had called it home that day. Maybe I did. I cannot recall. I've been carrying around the idea that Seattle is temporary for so long now that I've forgotten what home is.

Maybe it is time to change that. If I can find the fun within writing again, and I think it is coming back, then everything else usually falls into place for me. You two keep writing and I am sure to remember the joy. Good job, guys!

Oh, and if any plain, brown paper packages arrive at your doorsteps containing mermaid-on-mermaid action, umm, those are for me. Lord knows what the online purchases I coded in my sleep were.