BREAKING THE CYCLE OF NONBLOGGING

I need to write something. Anything. I suppose the six words I have just written constitute writing "anything," but...you know what I mean. This once-a-week blogging is shit.

***

crickets chirp the taffy

stretch of brutal writers' block

how much for a muse?

***

Andrew Jennings stumble-slouched along the sidewalk, his checkered fedora lying limp against his skull. The first Outbreak of Winter--hear all about it on the eleven o'clock news!--had hit and the small town of Yerkers, Maine, had ground to a stop. Spin-outs and fender-benders. Pedestrians, bundled up like five-and-a-half foot toddlers, trudged like ants through the whiteout world. Jennings wasn't dressed for the inclement weather. Three sheets to the wind, the truth was that he couldn't even really feel the cold. His internal thermostat was all fucked up.

In his drunken state, he had been staring blearily at the kitchen TV, not-focussing on a Disneyworld commercial, when Jiminy Cricket, of Pinnochio fame, had rapped with his umbrella against the inside of the screen and said, "Drew? Getcho ass outside and find you a muse, you drunk motherfuck."

Oddly enough, this had not surprised Jennings. A cartoon cricket was talking to him from inside the television set? So? And Jiminy had the voice of Samuel L. Jackson? So what? What was odd about that? Miracles happened every day, his dear old mother had once told him. If a hallucination constituted a miracle, well, so be it. He had simply nodded sagely at the screen, tipped a wink to good ole Jiminy, and, in his slippers and his ratty bathrobe and his checkered fedora, had set off down the slippery streets of Yerkers, intent upon finding his muse.

"Are you a muse?" he asked now, sidling up to a snow-woman, waiting scarved and puffy-coated at the bus stop.

She turned stiffly and regarded him with blue-eyed New England pragmatism. "Do you know that you're wearing a bathrobe?" she asked. Her eyes slid down. "And that it ain't exactly tied shut?"

Jennings glanced down. His boxer shorts had slid a bit, during his commute, and now his pal Mr. Friendly was wagging in the icy wind. He tucked himself back in and tied his bathrobe tight and looked down the street. The bus was slowly winding its way around the snowed-in cars and drifts of snow. It reminded him of a huge white beetle, its windshield wipers eyebrows. "The bus is coming," he said.

"Ayup," she said, looking past him. "It surely is."

They stood for a silent moment, and then Jennings spoke. "Well, I guess I'll be going now. There's gotta be a muse around here, somewhere."

"Ayup."

And so Andrew Jennings slouched off, his fedora plastered to his head like an upside-down buttercup, his knees purple with the cold.