Unmotivated to write today -- or more accurately, to write well. You're getting the autowriting I dish up whenever I feel like I should be writing something but lack the desire, and lucky bloody you.
I guess I could think about Halloween today, and I'm once again unprepared for it. I don't have a costume, or the vaguest notion of what kind of costume I'd like to wear to the Halloween party that I, in a moment of foolhardy optimism, recently committed to attend.
This happens every year. I always say "Ooh, next Halloween I'm gonna do this and that and the other," but I've yet to do this or that or anything at all. I could continue to lay down the usual excuses -- my face hates makeup; I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and never got used to celebrating Halloween; I simply don't like dressing up -- but this year, I'll come clean with you: My imagination doesn't work that way. I can write a sentence or take a picture that represents something beyond what is immediately visible, but I don't know how to make myself into something else and look like I believe it. Can't pretend, even for a moment, that I'm anyone or anything other than the olive-skinned meat sack pictured at above right.
I wouldn't really care about this but for the fact that two people near and dear to me -- my girl Lorien and my old friend Gregory -- can whip out Halloween costumes for themselves as if they were nothing. Gregory has shown up to Halloween parties dressed as a Ouija board or the entire Velvet Underground; Lorien has been Houdini, a zombie truck stop waitress and a picnic table. Both have offered many times to help me to come up with an All Hallows' Eve getup, but I've always refused. It has to come from me, and it has to be something so damned clever that I won't feel self-conscious about wearing it. Hasn't happened yet, and it's looking like it's not going to happen this year, either.
Maybe I'll go as autowriting.
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