I write a lot, like a lot a lot. Little of it is legible. Most of it I cannot even decipher. My life is a series of cubbyholes stuffed with tidbits of paper. My car’s cup holder, my nightstand drawers, my makeup organizer, all sweater and coat pockets, my purse – both the one I am currently carrying and the 2 others tucked away in my closet, and every drawer in my kitchen, all suffer the same fate. They are filled to the brim with incoherent ramblings that, should I ever be able to epiphanize the meanings, could net me either a bestselling novel or the secret to life. Since we are all still in hunker down mode, I decided to launch a grand cleaning and organizing endeavor. I call it “the winter that I wish were spring already” cleaning event. My goal is to have a single junk drawer in my kitchen, rather than a single decent drawer and a litany of junk ones, a closet full of wearable clothes instead of ones I’m compelled to keep from a decade ago, or more, and a nightstand drawer suitable for finding the chapstick after I’m already tucked into bed. I did not capitalize chapstick because, Texas. We are the home of generic name brands. All tissues are kleenex. All soft drinks are cokes. All lip balm is chapstick. But, let’s get back to all that paper: receipts with blotted lipstick stains on the back, fast food napkins, corners from memo pads, spent grocery lists, and even the odd magazine subscription insert. These fragments contain my life’s work. There are ideas for columns, ideas for blog entries, ideas for novels, & snippets meant for poems. They are mixed medium works written in ink, yes, but also pencil and map color and crayon and even eyebrow pencil. Each idea made perfect sense when I was compelled, often times against my will, to write them. Now, though, I struggle to pick up that ethereal web-like line of thought that has faded to invisible. So I gathered them together in my kitchen, unsure of how to save them but unwilling to say a final goodbye. Then, just yesterday, I was doing a legit writing exercise in my handy dandy writer wannabe training manual. The exercise was imagining you had fallen down a rabbit hole designed just to your specifications. I was to describe everything I saw. I looked to my right, greeted by the mountain of paper fragments that resembled the volcano Richard Dreyfuss makes out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lightbulb moment. Let’s build a rabbit hole based on the ramblings of a mad woman – but first, a poem.
