It’s late now, or maybe it’s early, maybe it’s too early to be late or too late to be early...I don’t know and it really doesn’t make a difference...the clock I bought at the thrift store is only right twice a day, sometimes like me so I just look outside the window at the sky and try to guess what time it is...I just finished off a bottle of cheap sake although even the cheap sake is costing more and more...I’m trying to finish up my latest, greatest story for a magazine that may or may not want it, and may or may not pay me for it...my editor will get on me for having run-on sentences and poor punctuation and all that proper grammar shit I never bothered to learn...my occasional publisher will keep me waiting for as long as possible before letting me know if they are going to use it or not...half the time when I get a check for something, I can’t even remember what it was for...I keep trying to wipe the blur out of my eyes but I’m not making any progress...the crickets have magically transformed into pretty birds singing and the sky is beginning to brighten...god, how depressing...there’s something cool about staying up all night although I don’t imagine it does the body much good...I don’t get romantic or spiritual about watching the sun come up like some people do, but I like watching it anyway for the sheer beauty of watching darkness give way to light...once it comes up, I wish for clouds and hope for rain...when you’re just sitting there and you feel like you don’t have a friend in the world or any kind of prospects, the moon just lets you be...the sun doesn’t ask you any questions; they leave you alone...they’re not prying into your life and giving you the evil eye and asking you when you’re going to get your life together...it’s just you and the keyboard and your mind, and even then the mind doesn’t always play along...it’s when you finally get some quiet time if you’re lucky...when everybody else is heading off to work in their cars on great expanses and spirals of gray concrete on the interstate, buses that have the right to cut in front of you, ain’t that great? (It’s the Law!), and overcrowded trains that usually run late (the U.S. has the worst mass transportation system among all the modern countries), you are finishing your work day so to speak...later, you’re collapsing into bed trying to get some much needed sleep...and hoping you remember what you just thought of that should have been in your story when you wake up...I stay up until about 7 or 8 in the morning and then I finally decide to try to get some sleep...of course then, the dogs want to eat, or go outside, or just bark randomly at something...I could have taken the easy way out and got a job digging ditches or punching a clock somewhere or working in a call center, but no, I had to infected with masochism and become a writer...I’ve worked in a steel mill but I didn’t want to be one of those lifers, and I worked in a dirty, hot warehouse and had my fill of that, but you gotta do what you gotta do...occasionally, I pick up a side job when the checks aren’t coming in, and that is a lot more frequent than I like, but a man has got to eat...so I will get some regular work for a while and keep my little secret to myself...whoever said that a man’s work defined him, never shoveled coal in his life...I never have been interested in writing the clichéd ‘Great American Novel’...most ‘Great American Novels’ aren’t nor do they ever get published.
