Write before checking emails

E-MAILS = NO WRITING

“Email is death to writing,” my old teacher said. I keep hearing his words as I type in my password and my pink writing pad lies over there bereft of words.

And yet my words don’t clamber out of my mind, down the path of my arm –into pen—onto paper. They sit silent in my head. Then I hear, “Butt in chair—Write!” Write anything. Just ramble on, at the very least it’s practice. Don’t stop, don’t ever stop or you’ll lose the habit. Lose the drive, the chance, the words. They’ll slip away like unexercised muscles, flabby nouns and verbs hanging off the thighs of my upheld old arms.

See! You should have worked that. Bench presses and wrist curls woulda helped, now it’s just useless flesh, hangin’ in the wind.

I always feel better when I write, virtuous, replete, smug. The way I feel after a long walk—huffing and puffing up the hill—bounding happily back down. Good girl.

Like a well trained dog that knows to shit only in her own yard. Whoa! Too many metaphors here (this one ridiculous, I think). Are my words carefully placed shit? Well, yes and no. Sometimes it’s rich organic material in which glory can burst forth—sometimes it’s just shit. (So, okay I’ll live with the mixed metaphors)

But any word on the paper is one less stuck inside of me—clogging up the works, slack muscles hanging even further down, down. And all the little nudges that beckon me away from my pen are stilled and silenced when I put that period at the end of the last sentence and chortle, “Now that’s good.”

Now-- I can check my emails.