Don't you just LOVE writer’s block?

     Don't you just LOVE writer’s block?  To a writer (and I sometimes attempt to pass myself off as one), an empty screen with a cursor blinking in the upper left corner (or for you old school types, a blank piece of pulped and pressed wood from our dwindling boreal forests) is a stark reminder that we are all but mere mortal beings.  It is the seventh of the month, I need to get my invoicing done and I am under the self-imposed obligation of writing something, anything to accompany my bills and to post on the blog.

     Ordinarily, life in the Smoky Mountains yields a continuous flow folksy, ironic, humorous, or arcane vignettes to keep my fingers busily skipping over the keyboard, gravely abusing literary license while weaving a concisely crafted narrative intended to amuse myself and potentially you.  Not that life has deserted the elevations of western North Carolina.  It is currently raining (of course), my sister, Connie, her daughter, Jade, and my niece’s friend Gabby (all flatlanders from the Garden State?? New Jersey), have been visiting this week, the Angel that lives high above us has developed a habit of daily visits to the point of implied residence, a black snake attempted to gain entry to the house through the side garage door, I got stung by a wasp (leaving a baseball size welt on the side of my leg, my garden is yielding tomatoes with inexplicable phalluses, and that nasty demon known to those of us it haunts as Vertigo has made an unexpected visit to my inner ear, but with all of these muses, I could not find anything amusing to occupy that damned white screen and its impatiently pulsing cursor.

     Here I sit, hungry in a famine, athirst and parched, enticed but flaccid, and that rhythmic reminder of my failing is becoming increasingly annoying.  So let’s concoct a ruse together.  You pretend that I have written something profound, humorous or educational and I will graciously accept your tacit kudos for my vacuous talents.  That way I can delude myself that our playacting is a genuinely accomplished success and finally open a more interesting graphic visual on the computer than this horrid blank screen (Solitaire anyone?).  It is difficult for me to publicly admit my shortcomings, I much prefer to guise myself in my carefully crafted façade as the supernatural omniscient wordsmith and anal grammarian.  (Too bad that wasp wasn't a radioactive spider -- Oh, what a tangled web I could weave!)