Sharp Edges

After church tonight, I went out driving.  Ostensibly, it was to get the only food that sounded good, a bacon cheeseburger from Wendy's, or at least the fry portion thereof.  Right now, if it sounds good, I try to go find it....  Really, though, what I wanted most was the dark, wet two-lane highway unfolding in front of me and very loud music playing.  Sometimes, as one of my students is so fond of saying, "it just be that way."

Tonight, I am not in a folksy mood.  Tonight I need loud bass and a dance beat.  Tonight I wish I had my hands in somebody's back pockets and vice versa on a dance floor.  It's just as well I don't live where that's possible or likely.  I have sharp edges tonight.  Anybody trying to handle me would just come away with blood on his hands.  I am not sure I know of anyone even strong enough to try.

Adding to my odd mood is the fact that I've already produced something like forty pages  of writing the last three days of this week, two complete pieces, and that feels righteously good.  One thing is more a less a throwaway, something I cut my teeth on again because I hadn't written anything in so long, a flexing of the muscles that I like less and less the more I look at it, but the other wasn't too terrible.  Both are finished, and I won't lie to you and tell you it didn't feel good to pull it out of my head, shape it by force of my will, and watch it come together.  It's more than a little like a form of magic. It's more than a little addictive.

Neither of those was the one I want to be working on.  They were just random bits that bothered me, and so I made them, put them where I knew they'd be appreciated.  Someday soon, I am going to start the real thing, the story I used to tell L. about when we were kids.  It's been sitting up there waiting for all these years, and I think I'm almost done with my journeyman phase.  I'm sure it won't be as easy as this other playing I've been doing, but more and more, I think that I want to try my hand at it.

Tomorrow, I will go back into the regular world.  It feels like so much more than a week has gone by.  I feel like I've been gone from there for a hundred years, like I've somehow slipped through one of those "rites of passage" and wasn't paying attention.  I don't know.  As I came home watching the headlights of oncoming traffic dance over the wet pavement, I thought about how I felt before I got out for the holiday and how I feel now.  Somehow, so much has changed.  It's strange.  It's as though I was stuck in a place of total stasis before last Tuesday.

Now, I would have to say that is not the case.  I still have some serious questions about some things, but last Tuesday was... a log-jam destroying moment, for lack of a better term.  Everything is now in a state of change.  What remains to be seen is what happens next.