Is it okay to spend hours looking over old notes, marveling over the fact you managed to come through the event in one piece while being awestruck at how stupid you were to do it to begin with? My notes read like the frantic scrawlings of a meth-head two hours away from withdrawal. There is a panicked and tactless urgency to everything, repetition lacing every page as if I’m attempting to force my own attention my dragging myself around in a creative circle, to force myself to concentrate, wander just far enough off-course that when I come back to where I must be, I will do so at a different angle and perhaps finally, the right one.

But even then some third part of me can’t keep the snark from the others. Words like, “NO!” written and traced in sprawling triplicate to create great black inked denunciations of the only lead I’ve had in a week. Three halves of a brain (two mine, one the demon I keep on my shoulder) fighting, bickering, snarling for the right to discover and destroy like sailors on shore leave.

There is a list here in front of me labeled “Things to go over with Death”. The words “Why am I here?” appear no less than fifteen times over the course of 8 pages. Many are based in the text, but some, I suspect come from that place you only find when the wall your staring at starts whispering back at you.

Then page 9 happens and it jumps to a point where I clearly just threw my hands up in disgust and said, “Fuck it, fuck everything, I’m writing an action scene.”

And I did. In involved giant robots with pilots and beta-grade AI called lions waging wars in famine and drought cursed pieces of our coming modernity. It is crass. Cliché characters committing carefully articulated war crimes for daring to shoot their low caliber weapons at the $1,000,000,000 metal composite that makes up the mechanical carapace. The lions are searching for something, something hidden, something dangerous, and when they arrive where it is supposed to be they find nothing is waiting for them…except for the dozens of choked, dismembered, and whimpering bodies of those they purged on the way to their once so righteously held endgame.

I don’t know why I wrote that story. It’s more pieces, jumping off points with half paragraphs telling of what has happened between the last full paragraph and the next, but it is strange to find it again. Strange mainly because looking at it from when I wrote in the summer of 2014, I was a mess, well, a slightly larger mess than presence.

It is not bad. It is impatient. It is not high art, but it is enjoyable. A violent, bloody romp of 1^st world using the powerless and angry as target practice the way a psychotic child may use the sun and magnifying glass against a squad of roaming ants.

I didn’t get to write last week, my daughter was sick. I got lots of baby hugs and she got lots of daddy hugs and we watched Phineas and Ferb and drank juice and chomped down on Rice Chex.

I’d be fine with calling it a vacation if she hadn’t gotten me sick in the process. 3^rd sinus infection in two months. The Kohl family has great sinuses, the best sinuses for infection. I’ve had doctors, the best doctors tell me that they’ve never seen such nostrils. Believe me, believe me! And the bacteria agree. And if the doctors and the bacteria are agreeing you know it must be right.