crap I need to write

I can’t write. I’ve forgotten how. Everything my fingers touch turns to shit. I can’t get past the thoughts of what needs to be done, what I need to write, what I haven’t written yet: they flood my mind, clouding it, like too many too many too many tiny raindrops meeting, pounding weakened levees, they come in gushes while I’m driving, or otherwise unavailable to write them down, give them their due attention. And by the time I am prepared to meet them, with pen and paper or at blank screen, they have trickled away, slithered into fissures, absorbed into parched earth. I am left with muddy streaks across my path, but no words.

I need to write about the night the baby woke up right as we, sleep-deprived and sex-starved, managed to get into the height of foreplay. I laughed, found it poetically ironic that the baby chose then to scream. After attempting to give him a bottle, sooth him in the swing, change his diaper, I packed him up to take him to wal-mart. by then, there was no hope of sexual satisfaction, so I figured I’d get something, anything done. I did my errands at 1:38 am in my pajamas with an infant. No one seemed to care that I was in my flannel pajama pants. No one knew about the black thong I wore underneath. The baby fell asleep in the car on the way home, only to wake up 15 minutes after going back in.

I need to write about the 26 year old pregnant woman in Ohio who was murdered a couple weeks ago. I don’t know why I need to write about this, except that it haunts me. I was relaying the story to my mom who’d not heard about it, and in talking about her little 2-year-old boy who seems to have witnessed the event, I started to cry. I don’t know the woman, her family, anything. but even now, I’m getting choked up. I feel so incredibly connected to her, it scares me.

I need to write about Food network. The way the cooks talk about food as if it were a lover, the way it always turns out perfect, the way they always sample the food they’ve prepared when they’re done, usually eating it alone.

I need to write about giant dancing hamburgers.

I need to write about how I know I’m frustrating my husband.

I need to write about cicadas again.

I need to write about Grandpap R.

I need to write about ruts.

And a thousand other things, but I don’t know where to start.