A rambling update of sorts, as I stumble through the end of my day.

Writing, yes, that came first. I've fumbled a bit ramping up after a busy fall. I got less writing than I'd hoped, more than I'd feared, I'll call it a win. My schedule scrambled and now I'm free, I've been ambivalent. When I sit down, the words are there, the characters and the story, stories await.

What gets in the way is the hesitation. What if I do this, that, the other thing? Always other things, most days not an issue, it's all just part of ramping back up again. The mind has its ways.

I had a wind-up this evening. Started thinking about marching ants, army ants, swarming insects of all sorts and the differences between them, some get riled up, some just are. Wasps, bees, even their far distant cousins jelly fish.

And then, the mind clicked, and a story frame came into being. I'll have to note it away for later, tuck it into the memory banks. There are moments in the future where I'll meet the characters, he and she and oh there are definite connotations here, I wonder who they are? Will they know when it's time? When it's their time? Or will they find themselves on the stage counting the marks and looking for the joker in the cheap seats, the one with a notebook and a smile on his face?

O storm of waters,
placid today, but only for a few minutes, I think. What have you in store for us,
later
this early morning pass is gearing up I see. Will the dogs be asleep?
One can only hope.

I see many other things out there, as I listen to singin' Simon, an old concert PBS has thrown up of an evening. When Carrie Fisher was doing her show, one of her great lines was something like "If you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you, I highly recommend it." The other thing I smile at, from Carrie, a story I heard several variations of, she loved so much the fans who thought of her, and told her they had her in mind as, a writer first and foremost.

The day gig versus the work of the heart; a reminder too of the power of That Story. The one that kicks out, finds its way to the hearts of the readers who've been waiting for it, That Story, maybe they've never known it and there it is, old friend just met.

Art slips away, grows beyond any fields, boundaries, we set. Becomes other. Fan-fic in all its glories. Does the Bard look on and giggle; revel in the forever high school productions, the re-skinnings, the re-tellings? Sure.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was my favorite. Then again, that might just have been Oldman and Roth hamming it up. So what, it's a wonderful thing. But then, I didn't write Hamlet. What would it have been to see instead Hamlet 2: Revenge of the Zombie Prince?

How many incomplete starts, do you think? Lost plays? Bits of poems, notes for a play from Chaucer's Tales? Would he have cared if someone came along and turned those into a new play, "Based on the works of William Shakespeare"? Sure, of course, the check cleared right? What some people will do for the money, and honey we've all been there. Bills to pay and the kids will go to college (please God let the kids go to college...)

Witness all the rock gods, and the commercials. When the adulation is done, and you've still gotta make the nut, pride ain't in it. And it's a lot easier on the hips and back and knees than getting up on stage and spending a few hours a night pretending to be eighteen again.

Old friends passing email between them
"You haven't..." "But I did, you never..."
like that.

Facebook and Instagram, who follows whom and the kids and their days.

Old friends have broken up and gone their separate ways, others, the ones
who settled in, keep pushing the oars. Pulling the chain. Digging in the mines
and trudging up the hill to tote the bale and haul the water.

Days wind down, winter in the wind, a bit brisk and aren't we supposed to
hibernate? Yet?

Airplanes warming up in the distance, a trip on the calendar, holidays coming
yesterday and tomorrow and gifts and food and and and...

silence. It wasn't it was. It ain't now. Pass it on pass it through the pass
of the yester-year was a moment that never existed not even a little bit itwasamirageidiot.Hatelovefear

deep breath. The work is here, where it's always been. The work and the love and the new and the old. The tangled tanked up
path
between
the here
the now the
tomorrow
yesterday. none of them more than figments, either. Yet all together? All together now all together now.Hmm.

Sometone someone that one. She will be fine, write.