Ten for Today: From Coffee to Beer Life Goes On

A bar. One of a few I frequent to write and imbibe heading into happy hour. During the day I wrote in a Vietnamese gluten-free, vegan make your own design of a meal restaurant around the corner. The owner is friendly and generous. He often gives me a free gluten free basil and chili home baked cookie or a piping hot freshly roasted slice of Kabocha squash, like he did today. I write there for hours, sipping a caffeine-loaded Vietnamese iced coffee, the one with loads of ice and condensed milk to offset the deep, strong coffee shots. He tells me about his mysteriously buckling knee for which no MRI nor doctor can discover let alone cure the ailment.

I wrote about well-being, connection, and compassion in companies–and got paid for it. I actually got paid to write something I believe in, a refreshing change from the usual 20 ways or things listicles that make me want to rip my eyeballs out of their sockets and drop them on the ice of my Vietnamese coffee. But it’s work. I can’t complain too much. Any day writing is better than a day slinging hash or practicing law for that matter. 

And yet, the procrastination…why? It makes my job so much more difficult. I have no real patience for ease, I’m surmising. 

But today at the corner bar, called The Corner, I sat on a stool and wrote my Nanowrimo tortured piece. It’s supposed to be a novel, but it’s a piece of shit, some sort of mosaic of events and dialogue and scenes that make no sense, have no order. It’s worse than last year, which at least had a thread if not grace and a point. This year’s is more than pointless. It’s almost a waste of time unless I can pull something out of it, some conclusion, reflection or resolution of what the hell happened to the world, my world among the larger world.