Thursday, September 28, 2006

Wild Bill Has a Limp Dick

I know this about Wild Bill thanks to the graffiti in the women's bathroom at the Lafayette Tap Room. I feel bad for Bill, really I do. But you know who else I feel bad for? Kathy.

Kathy, apparently, gives good blowjobs. And now the whole world knows it.

Who cares?! the graffiti underneath that statement asked.

Nobody here! someone else wrote.

It was a whole conversation, a whole dialogue between a group of women, recorded there on the wall in thick black marker. Here's a question: who carries a black marker with them at all times? Are there serial bathroom graffiti-ists?

These are the things I'm thinking about these days. I should be thinking about other things--one of them being writing, and how the writing isn't going so well for me this week (or the last or the one before that). I'm more engaged in the art of nesting than I am the art of writing.

I'm squirreling things away. I'm finding little things I eventually want to use, and I'm writing them down and sticking them all over my room, but that's where their adventure ends.

For instance:

I was driving somewhere. I had Amy in the car, and she was talking about boys, and she was talking about girls doing things with boys, and she used the phrase some kind of heavy petting. As in, "Oh, you know, they were doing some kind of heavy petting."

When I heard that I said to myself, I must steal that. Tell me it wouldn't be a great title.

So I wrote that down, and it's sitting here on my computer stand, but that's as far as it's going to go for awhile. I'm backlogged. I have three open stories right now. One involves grapes, another involves racecars, and another is trying to form a plot around the terrifying question What Would Happen If I Were Forced To Move Into An Apartment With My 19 Year Old Nasty-Ass Brother? Oh, the hilarity that would ensue.

But none of that is really working for me right now. I'm spending days wondering (read: obsessing) if I'm funny (I suspect I'm not and never have been), if I'm frivolous (check, please), and if I'll ever snap out of this--the ugliest, the meanest, the most sinister slump I've ever been in. I'm sick of writing in snippets. I'm sick of hating anything I put on the screen. I'm sick of wondering if what I'm writing is any good at all. I would like to get back to my old self, my productive self, my confident self.

But I guess for now it's just me and Wild Bill and his limp dick. I guess it's just me running back to my table at the bar to write it all down so I don't forget the detail that I hope I will be able to use soon, soon, oh please God, soon.

1 comment:

Diana said...

I'm writing you an email right now.