Welcome to everyone who is experiencing Monday as the ravenous hell-beast that it is. If you find yourself at any point today desiring to pull your eyeballs out of their sockets and whip them around your head by the optic nerves, I think we can be the absolute best of friends over a few tens of drinks and a really strong pitcher of coffee, whaddya say?

Like Kris from Not Yet a Wino, I’m rather fond of writing games that require me to stretch my mind in various directions and come up with some sort of plot out of thin air. Normally I attempt not to blatantly steal an idea from another blogger, but in this case I’m doing exactly that — both because living Monday is enough of a workout (the writing ideas I have to blog about would be a tremendous effort today) and also because — hey, who doesn’t like a game, right?

So here it is: below you will find an opening paragraph to a short story, novel, etc.; the length matters not, but what it DOES require is your creative juices and muse! If you feel so inclined (and I urge you to give your inspiration a shot even if you aren’t confident in it — we’re all friends here), please leave a comment and give us the next couple sentences, paragraph, or paragraphs of the story as you see it from your perspective. Check back often to see what others have written — it should be very fun and interesting to see how you folks’ minds tick!

The Story So Far:

To be honest, he wasn’t sure if he noticed the shoe or the lips first. Shoe-wise, it was an incredible specimen, to be sure — thick, brown English leather construction of high quality, the sort of footwear that enters a boardroom at 9 and exits well before noon having made three pivotal, business-changing decisions, eaten a frosted cinnamon roll with delicate character, and spent the remainder of the time waggling eyebrows with the extraordinarily cute sales rep. Shoes with light tan and orange laces that didn’t simply make a statement, they practically gave a commencement speech. Heels that commanded respect from the tiles and not mere tolerance. Yes, these shoes were something else, but the lips are what really took the express train home with a pastry in tow. The problem of the lips was whether or not their proximity to the aforementioned stately wingtips was going to interfere with his abilities or not.

Go to it, folks, and have fun!

I sometimes wonder what my mind would be like to not have a million voices and thoughtstreams flowing through it at any given time.   To just for once have the ability to shut everything else out except that one, singular path that I wanted — or needed — to tread upon and to stay the course until it was completely thought out.

In computer programming, we call this any number of names, but it’s usually, “getting in the zone” or “going on a coding spree” or a “hackathon”.    We have the ability to get into a mode, a method of thinking and reacting, that shuts out 98% of everything else and distills your neurons down into a fine, smooth wine of design and bits and logic.   It’s a beautiful thing to be in…when it happens.

Writers talk about finding a similar comfortable spot of mental clarity and developing that into a habit for producing their prose.   It’s a shut-out against everything else for that one, sacred, glowing spot of white in the middle.

I’ve been terribly distracted and unable to silence the voices that ramble in my head all the time and so I’m finding it increasingly difficult to be at my peak performance.   Tactile things seem much more do-able at the moment and pure thought is fleeting at best and shouting crowds of bullcrap at the worst.     Whoever is driving the crazy-train in my head is certainly having fun trying to jump the tracks.

Much like the weather outside, my brain is like a blowing snowstorm, things flying this way and that, eddies of wind whipping around hidden corners and swirling in the middle of the room.    To hold onto a thought is like trying to fly a kite in a jet engine it seems.

I should have been a carpenter.

In Other News…

Despite my concentration issues at hand, on March 6th I will be guest-blogging at the ever-revealing blog Morning Erection.   To say that I’m excited about this is like saying that I like taffy a lot, and I’m a man who likes his taffy.   I’m currently planning out the piece that I will be doing there and it should be a good, fun opportunity.     Tom is a great guy and often writes a lot of varied pieces (much like this blog) that touch, inspire, and make you tilt your head sideways.

I encourage you to stop on over to Morning Erection and get a feel for what Tom’s doing and to stop over there on March 6th to see my guest post.    I’ll be sure to mention it here and on my Twitter to let you know as well.

A thick, sludgy funk has enveloped my mind of late and reduced my thoughts to the pace of an old man’s nose-wiping ritual.  I offer unto your critical eyes the fact that I haven’t touched this love-child of mine in 21 days despite having the absolute best of intentions to continue the conversation, yet without the mental warehouse to back up the effort.

I find myself of late needing to break loose from a great deal of things.

Sticky things.   The kind that hang on for dear life with those creepy-ass suction cups that octopuses (octopussies? octopussai?) have.

Mind – As mentioned above, this gunky crap that seems to have settled on me leaves me unreceptive to truly taxing or inspirational thought; things that might actually make good, deep sense fall easily away and I’m reduced to finding the Kardashians to be mentally scintillating.    (This is nearly reaching a level of simply sticking a hot poker into my ear to prevent further damage; I assure you, I’ve considered.)   Just hammering out this prose is going to wind me and cause stars to swirl overhead.

Body — More and more am I being impressed upon that this bulk of a beast is causing issues and I am best to move it along to a different stage of existence.    For that matter, I’ve done rather well of late in establishing a good cardio routine and weight lifting series; the subject at hand has been known to grunt 80lbs up and down in the air like he knows what he’s doing with it (on occasion) and has so far avoided damaging the furniture; this all being said, I still feel like I am waylaid in a tarpit full of molasses and buxom young cheerleaders during a severe blonde drought.

I know I can break free and actually shed this coat, the question is simply a matter of how.     Women, I hear, find there to be a corporate/governmental glass ceiling, but mine’s made out of sheets of subcutaneous fat.     It doesn’t shatter well without the careful application of an M80.

Maybe I need one of those rice, spring water, and cod liver oil cleanses or something.   Are they back in fashion now?

Profession — Computer programming has forever been a matter of being in the correct mindset, of obtaining that particular zen-state of being where code flows from one’s mind directly into the fingertips and out across history, forever captured like a beautiful painting is frozen in pigment blotches.   You can force a painter to do his art, of course, but the true inspiration comes from within, not without.

I glimpsed this on Sunday for awhile, feeling that creep down my arms and light me on fire as the world slowly faded and I became one with the machine and the thought.    Past that, the pursuit has been unclear again this month and I can only hope for a little light to suddenly turn on — or enough caffeine to artificially induce me.

The Inescapable Truth — I’m stuck, I guess…not really spinning my wheels, but at the same time, I’m not really headed anywhere, either.   And eating at McDonald’s all the time vs. just not eating…well, sometimes it’s not always better, ya know?

The lifelines I cling to right now are my lovely wife, my adorable and entertaining son, my never-dull job, and all of you people out there, doing the things I wished I was, writing the blog posts I know I can if I only I could clear this spiderweb, and hammering the lines with all sorts of funny quips, inspirational quotes, profound emotions, and memorable times.   I cling to you all, I hope you know that.    Purely platonic, of course, although I’ve been known to glance at a boob from time to time.

In truth, we can’t go anywhere but onwards, right?

The atomic number of germanium.

The freezing point of water at sea level in Fahrenheit.

The number of completed, numbered piano sonatas written by Beethoven.

The number of footsteps sung about by They Might Be Giants.

The number of Kabbalistic Paths of Wisdom.

In chess, the number of black squares, white squares, and pieces.

The number of panels of leather on an official soccer ball.

The number of teeth in a full set of an adult human.

The size of a databus in bits.

The size of an IPv4 Internet address.

The ASCII and Unicode code for a space character.

The international telephone code for Belgium.

The year in which the Roman council declared war against Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

And, apparently, my designation for the next year of life.

I’m half-way to retirement if nothing else!