A little turbulence
January 18th, 2006
“Flight 1104 to tower. Come in tower.”
“This tower, go ahead flight 1104.”
“Tower, we are initiating emergency landing procedures. Our starboard engine has completely failed and port is down to about fifty percent. Currently at eighteen thousand feet elevation and falling at approximately fifteen hundred feet per minute. We’re vectoring for unpopulated groundspace, but controls are sluggish. Please advise…”
“Flight 1104 this is tower. We have a plan. It’s a longshot, but if it works you ought to be able to land normally. Flight 1104– simply quit fooling around– sit your lazy carcass down and type!”
As you may have guessed I am the commander of the above-storied flight 1104. See this is how the crashes start here: we have a big, very cool weekend– just the recording of which is exactly the kind of thing that makes this writing project worthwhile, but it’s so big that I fall asleep early each night procrastinating that recording for the next day and the next day and the– etc. So that eventually, I just let it go because I can’t remember enough to do it justice and then I figure that since I let that big weekend get away, I can’t just go back to the day-to-day blab– now I have to wait for another big event to get back in the swing of regular writing, but when that event comes along it’s been so long since I wrote I am out of practice and have a hard time buckling down to it so I put it off for the next day and the next and th– you get the picture.
The only way I can pull back on the metaphorical control yoke is to back-burner all the other piddly crap I thought I might like to get to tonight; cut the casual, time-wasting surfing; start my text editor; and get typing. So here we go. The ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign is now lit. Hang on tight, and hopefully the landing will be smooth.
Last night I wrote for almost three hours and had roughly sixteen hundred words when I ran out of steam. We had a pretty big weekend and I’d only made it up to the start of Friday night!
So this is just a kind of notification to say “Hey- there’s stuff coming up. It’ll be here as soon as I finish it, but probably not till tomorrow. We’ll see how much I can get done tonight.”
I guess just to fill up space I’ll close with my favorite recent joke:
A guy walks into pharmacy and goes to the counter where a pharmacist is on duty.
“May I help you, sir,” the pharmacist asks.
“Uh, yeah. Do you have a cure for hiccups?”
The pharmacist rares back his right hand and delivers a whopping smack right across the guy’s chops.
“Hey- what the *&^%’s wrong with you? What did you do that for,” shouts the irate customer.
“You don’t have hiccups anymore do you,” replies the pharmacist with a smug grin.
“No,” the guy says angrily “but my wife in the car still does!”