Shower Muse

I fictionally imagine myself as a serious writer. When I sit down to write I perch a colorful parrot on my shoulder and wear a plumed pirate hat for creative ambience. I even cajole a temp secretary to take dictation naked while I’m in the shower. All my best ideas come under a hot, pulsating shower. She sits nude and dry, outside the shower and scribes in shorthand my spontaneous concepts and shampoo epiphanies. It’s easier for me to recite to a secretary au natural when I’m all lathered up than it is for me to sit for hours in a leather chair, staring at my computer keyboard waiting for my literary muse to finish drying her hair.

My creative writing process is like watching a silent movie without buttered popcorn or milk duds and woefully stab at composing lines and dialogue for the two-reeler’s title cards. A boring, mind numbing, mental stop-action pantomime if not for my eccentric herky-jerky analogies, similes and metaphors. It’s mental evisceration with a kabob stick. Thinking of the naked secretary helps sooth my concept carnage only marginally.

I haven’t always pursued writing, I used to create visual art, sketches, paintings, sculptures. Most of my artistic escapades are now in the sifted remains of corporate take overs, foreclosures and the refuse bins behind hotels. I’ve been to the creative mountain top... you just can’t find any forensic evidence to corroborate it. I also dedicated 30 creative years to the music business, doing all the hard work associated with mastering a difficult instrument while practicing the music industry’s requisite, predatory self-promotional mannerisms. My reward and Gilead balm for all the sling-and-arrow wounds suffered was the dim delusion of fame and glory about the penniless legend in my own mind. Ah, when giants walked the earth.

The practice and discipline of writing on the other hand, means something. Writing, a craft whose chiseled-out prose gives birth to revered words then printed for posterity and intelligently designed to elevate both society and culture to a higher plane.

So now, in the fall of my life, I’m exercising the last vestiges of my impulsive creative urges through writing. And I’ve recently discovered something important about my last tango with word-smithing: there’s no such thing as mediocre writing. It’s not a game of horseshoes, grenades and nuclear reactors where close counts. No indeed, there’s only good writing and anything else is just plain CRAP.

But I said to this guy, over an early breakfast of pancakes, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, nay but a shovel in my calloused hands. One must clean many stables before they sing Herculean praise of your labors.…

#Challenge #humor #fiction #flash fiction #muse #writing #lampoon #satire #william calkins