The Muse is back
I knew the happy days would end. The Muse is back from her trip to Mexico with the semi-famous (at least in his own mind) design advice maven, Dr. Design.
She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.
“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times. She lit another.
“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.
“Thanks, bub.”
My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.
“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?” She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.
“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”
“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.
“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.
“No. I don’t.”
“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”
I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?
(To be continued…)