My thoughts this morning comprise a jumble of unrelated and incomplete ideas that careen through my mind as if they were running from something dangerous. They stumble and fall and bounce off the inside of my head as they flee whatever it is that’s trying to capture them. I think the caffeine in my coffee may have been concentrated. The hyper-juice may have bypassed my digestive system and sped directly into my brain, causing thought-mistakes to spread like wildfire on a gasoline farm at the peak of harvest season.
There’s no point in trying to write a coherent essay or, for that matter, a piece of incoherent fiction. My fingers refuse to strike the keyboard in an orderly way; they follow my brain’s instructions, which demand a chaotic drumming of the keys. But even my fingers worry that my brain may have been hacked by a virus for which there is no known remedy. I can tell that my fingers are concerned by the way they repeatedly mis-key letters; they may be sending me a message, in code, that something is amiss.
The snarl of entangled ideas that spilled through my fingers this morning touch on subjects from spiritual deficits to the unintended consequences of urban re-zoning. I tried and failed to write about starting new holiday traditions in the absence of progeny to carry them on. And I attempted to document the loneliness of holidays spent in the absence of friends and extended family. My derailed efforts also included a dark fiction story about a prisoner who escaped after being treated like a fierce animal and tortured. None of those endeavors yielded tolerable results, so my angry fingers began stabbing at the keyboard; the results, such as they are, stand on the screen in front of you.
I’ll restrain my fingers now. There’s nothing to be gained in giving them free rein to express themselves as they see fit. They might divulge thoughts I must keep to myself, lest I reveal patterns of lethal intent or libidinous desire or savage behavior of one form or another. I’ve spent two and a half hours in wasted efforts to produce something worth reading and, instead, I produced this. Ach.
