Non-Comet Allie

I don't know why it is, but when I'm someplace where I really shouldn't be writing--in the back of my Art History class, for instance, with the lights out and the projector running--I have almost no choice. Those phantom ideas I keep hoping to catch in my free time cross the boarder of my brain on exaggerated cartoon-like tiptoe, shoes in hand. And there I am, off my guard, and not knowing how to handle them.

(Internal monologue starts with something about a meteor--it sounds like meatier. What's meatier than a meteor? A comet, maybe. But it can't be a comet, because they had one of those in Avatar: The Last Airbender. No comets. I could have a meteor about to come crashing to earth, and Din would call it "the wrecking ball of the gods"--how like him--and some enemy or other has "the wrecking ball of the something gods at their beck and call", for the sake of the rhyme. I just need an adjective there, to make the metre work…)

Now once I get out of class, and I have some hours of free time in the library, with my cup of tea and everything handsome about me, I simply don't write. I flit from shelf to shelf, reading titles and beginnings, but not committing to anything, and I idly check to see if I've been emailed. Sometimes I don't even touch the laptop, as if some instinct kept me from it--maybe some instinct that, thousands of years ago, prevented men from messing with cave paintings all day long and turned them toward the crops.

Wow, too much college lecturing on social evolution for me. Also too much Steinbeck. I have a musty copy of The Wayward Bus beside me, and I'm reading it--noncommittally.

teabag's torn to form a bookmark in case

I want to come back to it next week