OK, that really has nothing to do with my post. It was just a random Seinfeld moment. (Mandelbaum!)

When all this book stuff start kicking off in Nov. 2007, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep for about three weeks. Sleep deprivation turned a minor cold into a nasty sinus infection, which in turn wreaked havoc on my head-innards, resulting in total blockage and a lot of misery. Last Wednesday, my doctor, a very lovely and conscientious woman and her stellar OR team broke apart the little eggshell thin bones in my sinuses and snipped out the offensive tissue. Now, a very small man could probably go spelunking in there. It was a roller coaster week of evaluating the possible complications and trying to make peace with the idea of waking up blind or not at all, brain fluid leaking from my head, mysterious, unstoppable geysers of blood…I could go on. I’ve quite the imagination for gore, you know. I came home, woozy from anesthesia and promptly went to bed, where I stayed for three days. How lovely to have a valid excuse to avoid domestic tedium! I read, watched many eps. of Bones and slept and dreamed.

Doing nothing is creatively fruitful. While I was too weary to write, I spent much time thinking, a highly underrated pastime. It is one of my favorite hobbies, second only to drinking whiskey and eating cookies. We are afforded precious little time to simply sit and mull. What fun it is!

I’m ready to get back to work and pin down some of those ideas before they’re gone. The blank spot that is the two hours of lost consciousness is like a demarcation line separating before and after. Whatever writing-related agonies that manifested in my tissues over the past 3 years have been excised. A loop is pulled closed. There is a sense of something having been taken from me, allowing me to move forward less burdened. I’m not prone to sentiment or applying meaning to random occurrences, but a part of me is convinced that there’s something terribly profound in choosing to face death (however likely or unlikely the possibility), and its silent black nothingness.

Worries about what would happen to my next book flitted nervously about. We haven’t even begun the line edit yet. What if something terrible happened to me? Would Tattoo die too? Could I assign its completion and editorial duties to a friend or team of friends? It would be like selecting a godparent for my child. Would anyone be willing to take the responsibility? In the end, I convinced myself there was no need to be extra-morbid and adopted a very que sera, sera attitude about the whole thing, and here I am, alive to write another day.

I can breathe easy now, literally and figuratively. Let the line edit commence!