The Thinker

Sometimes I can't force it all out, so I leak a little. It's okay, I know they'll put a diaper on me someday, just like they did to my old man, but these days it's still just a drop or two. Today a big thunderstorm came through and water started pourin down through the plasterboard around the chimney. I thought I'd sealed the sucker, but the deluge found me out. The paint's been bubblin and peelin and the stain is spreadin like a spider web. I put a bucket down, and some newspaper, but I'm gonna have to patch the ceiling and turn the hair dryer on the carpet when the rain stops. Don't want no mold. You ever try patchin a ceiling with tape and spackle and get it to look seamless? Shoot, I better get somebody else to do it who knows how to handle a putty knife.

This is what they call life, isn't it, poot? You sit around and after a while something happens. A branch falls off the shagbark silver maple and hits the gutter. You curse and stomp your feet, then you go back to whatever it was that you were doin. Thinkin, hey, some day I better fix that effin thing so water don't leak all over the deck. It's startin to turn green.

I think to myself, clever how everything's been connected. Makes it impossible to figger it all out. One day you're eating lobster ravioli in Edison with your family, the next day you're spreadin the Sunday Times all over the floor by yourself. Somebody upstairs's gotta be laughin Big Time, dontcha think? After all, we're pretty effin funny when we got our pants draped around our ankles, sittin there like Rodin's model, readin the latest issue of the New Yorker, lettin go of the morbid matter we manufactured overnight. So serious it's hilarious.

So now I'm thinkin. Didja see O'Neill's review of the Beckett letters in the TBR? Seems everybody's been hung up on turd. We make something and it gets carried away. Just like the sentences we write. Once they go out into the world, they ain't ours no more, they belong to whoever reads 'em -- and if you're a writer, you better thank your lucky stars you got any readers at all.