Addicted

I have a writing life. I’m not Stephen King but I have a writing life. One that I think about a lot – how much am I writing, is my writing any good, does it matter?

My big accomplishment this year on my blog is that everything posted has been new. No reposts, no reruns, as my husband calls them. Just fresh content, as limp and pale as it sometimes is, like the Boston lettuce I bought Saturday at a market known for its produce. I dropped eleven dollars there, had it rolled up in my pocket and was holding it in my hand, and somewhere between the limp, pale Boston lettuce and the shallots, I lost it, discovering this only when I was standing in the check-out line. I was naked of money, not having brought in my wallet, just my rolled up money like when my mother used to give me a nickel in a hanky to give to the bus driver on the bus that took us to Gun Lake to swim. I had no nickel and no eleven dollars. It felt unpleasant, but on the way out I saw a guy, out of place, maybe homeless, opening a bag with three bagels and sitting, eating one of them, at a table in the sun. Maybe he found my eleven dollars, I thought. It made me feel better.

I’ve let myself just run on like that. I’ve decided that saying something is better than saying something perfectly. Maybe I’ll go back and make it better. Maybe I won’t.

My husband made larb to put on the pale, limp lettuce to make a larb salad. Larb is a Thai dish. Howard made his with ground chicken, Thai peppers, shallots, green onions, fish sauce, and an extraordinary amount of lime juice, an orchard of lime juice, enough lime juice to wash one’s hands in and still have some left over to splash on one’s face if one wanted a particularly citrus-y pick-me-up. It was very tangy. I told a friend of mine once that I had larb for lunch and she said, “I have a problem with the name.” I agree. It isn’t a good name for a dish.

So my writing life is ever-present. It is an obligation, something I feel odd about if I don’t do, like leaving a sink full of dirty dishes and going to bed, and sometimes I wonder if that’s a good thing or not. I do know if I didn’t have this blog or have a workshop meeting the next morning, I might not ever write a word. And sometimes I think I’ve said everything a person could say. But I know that’s not true. There is more where that came from. I think. I’m not sure.

Of all the compulsions one could have, this isn’t a bad one.