A Picking Problem

1/01/21

A Picking Problem

11:00PM

New year, new me. Yeah right. With the year I’ve had, it’s hard to believe that any more muck can get caked onto the windshield of my car as I speed home down some back-country roads to a place I can only affectionately call Home. But where is Home these days? 

I finger what can only be considered a scabby snail of blood clot out of my nose into a tissue—except I can’t find a tissue so I fling it out the window. But then my problem persists. I can breathe now that the little guy is gone, but he opened up a dam.

“Damn…” I pinch my nose and think of how someone would somehow understand the rationale of casual picking. Everyone does it. But most absent minded pickers aren’t used to the visceral implications of having nasal lining that is made of tissue paper and used to the cracking of weather changes.

“EW! Why would you do that?” I’m greeted by the jolly inquisition of my wife as I scramble with blood caked on my face. She knows me too well...but still can’t understand the rationale. I don’t either. I shrug. I’m queasy from the gallon I drank on the way home. I try to speak but my nose is plugged up with clots again and I can feel its tail tickle my stomach.

“What’s for dinner?” But it comes out as “wads bor dinner.” I suck in a huge helping of seconds, trying hard not to gag. I smile a crusty smile. “You know how it goes.” I say a little more clearly. 

At this point in re-entry I try to give my wife my usual kiss and hug but she squirms away and shrieks in, justifiable, abject horror. I would too. But I can’t help but feel a little lonely.

I rinse up and rush upstairs after contending with aftershocks and latent tidal surges from my menstruating nose. Fortunately the periods only come with the seasons. But I’m sure the lost blood gives me an extra pale demeanor. 

Now if I left it at that I’m sure it would give you a bad taste in your mouth. Like pennies. Coffee does wonders for getting the taste out though. It’s my elixir. It’s what I snort to get the caffeine flowing faster. When it hits the adrenaline it spikes the creative juices. 

If only the stores weren’t empty. So I open up my usual tabs and see where I can force out practice in metafiction. Can I make it clear enough to read?  

I feel the pressure build as aches in my shoulder from a devastating injury I sustained just a few months before mass lockdowns sweeped the nation. Then going unemployed...So I find a goal in the dawning hours of the new year. Is there enough time? Will I be able to submit in time? And then I find it…

One that resonates with. It’s 10:59pm….is there enough time to make a coherent story in that short of a frame of time? As NPH used to say...Challenge Accepted.  

11:01. The clock ticks away and I wonder if it’s even worth my time to spit out ideas and effort towards a prompt I only found a moment ago. Every night for the past several months my sleep cycles have been so erratic. I’m sure others were in much worse positions. I was fortunate enough to have survived so far on the grace of Pandemia (the inevitable mania associated with Pandemics). Love it or hate it I was able to focus a lot of my time on improving my writing craft.

If that were only the case. A week before Thanksgiving my transmission went out in my car that I had just paid off. Another four grand down the proverbial drain. But it’s ok. We had a couple other cars. Just not my car. And that wasn’t the first time the transmission went out in my car with less than 130,000 miles. 

11:11 Make a wish. The irony that I race while I push the limits of my word processing capabilities to achieve something of a semblance of a story woven with some clarity with some kind of chance against the unknown. What do I wish for? How much time is left on the clock? 

The only one keeping score these days with my accolades seems to be myself. But who can blame the world while a poet whispers to woods that speak only echoes back. Thus has become the stagnant nation of social media. But that’s my own version of reality. I understand that in order to remove the toxins left from my past I have to push myself to the limits. But will the challenges be enough to push me to my best? Only time will tell.

“Lasagna ok?”

“Mmm. Saucey. Love it. Sounds good to me.”

And I know a lot of people have had a shit year. It’s just how it went, as the story goes. And as it continues to go. I just find it ironic that after the muck and mental mire that I was already dealing with finding a way back to breathe that fate would give me a crippling amount of time for self reflection. But how do I make the best use of that time I spent learning and writing?

Write more of course. Take every prompt as a challenge. Use them to build up your skills and delve into the experimentation of language arts. Would be dumb not to use this as an opportunity to test the waters. 

Especially if the style of prose is going to be similar to that dream novel I’ve been working on for the past five years. What’s become of that anyway?

That’s a story for another day.

At this point I’m sure you have a couple of questions.

“Dinner’s ready.”

“Ok. Almost done.”

But, like a good nosebleed, I gotta run.

But who eats at midnight? Only those hungry to work well into the night.