It

It.

That's all that's left. A gristly problem stewing in the back of my head suddenly boiled over and I sat down catch the steam. I caught it all and it burned my hands and made me happy. Whew. Got that down, now I can move on. Save. Time to go do some other non-writing things for a bit and happily so because I'd boiled down that particularly unpalatable piece of meat and made it tender, fall off the bone, delectable spicy BBQ.  And then, the horror.
Sitting down to review and pick up where I left off, I found It. Only It.

Shakespeare never used a laptop. He never sat down and scribbled out drafts in disappearing ink. Maybe he did. Maybe his pet parrot screamed once and startled him and knocked his ink everywhere and he had to say OK, that's it. You are banished. Banish-ed. You have to pronounce the ed separately when you are speaking of Shakespeare.

I don't think I'm like Shakespeare, no delusions that grand around here. I will say I don't particularly care for Shakespeare. I can't decide if that's an ignorant or pretentious thing to say. It's not that I don't understand him or his import. I'm just a little lukewarm about him. Meh. His sonnets are dreadful. I'm not sure that's his fault, though. Sonnets seem to be designed to be dreadful. All that clapping and rhyming. It's clamorous. I wrote a sonnet for a friend of mine and that was dreadful, too. He said it was a little depressing. I have managed to combine both ignorant and pretentious now, with a side of depression. Shakespeare's like Buddy Holly. I understand his pioneering ways, his influence on so many things to come. I recognize his importance and I respect it. But still, meh. Don't tell my husband I said that about Buddy Holly.

It.

You know when macaroni boils over on the stove and then you don't wipe it up right away and there's that gummy crusty mess that's left around the burner? That's what's left in my head from my flash of insight. So I'm picking the crusty bits up and licking them and they taste kind of like macaroni, but you know, it's just not the same. Not at all. It's gross and kind of desperate and strange, actually. Maybe you don't do that. Maybe you wipe off your stove when something boils over. I should probably wipe off the stove and make some lunch instead. Maybe a crust-less PB&J. Something safe, benign and comforting.
Like how I sit here and yammer about Shakespeare and macaroni and llamas.

You don't know about the llamas. That was another place I said something about the llamas. I have typed the word llama at least once every single day this week in vastly different contexts. How does that happen? A huge dromedary takes up residence in my brain and asserts itself whenever possible. Not even where it's possible. She shoehorns herself into the most impossible of places. I kissed a llama on the mouth once. More than once if you must know. It was at a kangaroo farm and, as you probably know, at a roadside kangaroo farm just about anything goes. So. It. I have a luscious dromedary in my brain batting its ridiculously glamorous eyelashes at me. Llama kisses are not as smelly or as lippy or as llama-y as you would imagine. I have kissed worse things on the mouth. Like that guy that had that one dangly baby tooth behind his permanent teeth. Is a llama a dromedary?

It.

Macaroni is supposed to be comfort food, too. I don't really like it, though. Meh. Like Shakespeare and Buddy Holly. I'm not listening to those men right now. I'm listening to raw and uncomfortable alt-country that reminds me of such a tender, broken time for me. Decidedly not Buddy Holly or macaroni. I poke these bruises and feel the warm spread of pain and I kind of like it. Everyone does that. I used to sit on the toilet and count the moles on my thighs and push on all of my bruises. Get out of there if you're done! My mom would holler, You'll get hemorrhoids if you sit in there that long! How does a four-year-old get hemorrhoids? I didn't even know what they were, but you know, just the sound of it. I just noticed an unacceptable typo which I will now fix, but boy, what on earth? They're waiting for you over there with their straight-jackets. I like to pronounce hemorrhoids like this: hemmer-hoids. Saying all the H's. I also say Pinot Gringo instead of Pinot Grigio. Sometimes I forget and say such things in front of strangers and they think me, at best, odd. At worst, ignorant. Sometimes I also say expecially on purpose. What I did not do on purpose, though, was order a black anus steak sandwich at Quizno's once. Even though my husband insists I did.

It.

A friend and I have long believed that some people have It and some people don't. By It, what do we mean? A certain joie de vivre? I can't pronounce French words without sounding like a llama. It is a certain creative spirit, approach to things, an effervescence. Do we all have It? I think so. I think some people forget or lose It. I think some people just don't really care and would rather be comfortable in their brains rather than having llamas and such in there. An oh, what's for dinner tonight? kind of approach to things. Rather than an if I make this for dinner tonight, what does that say about me as a mother or a wife or a person? What does it say about the future of the human race?!  kind of cud chewing. I sometimes pine for the former, but there's a faucet in my kitchen that if you don't shut it off just right will drip, drip, drip and make you completely insane, but the plumbing is old and explosive and I'm afraid if I get in there and monkey around with it, there will be no water at all. Do you know what I'm saying here? So some people see It wandering about their psychic houses and say no thank you, that's a three mile stretch of bad road looking for a heart attack in a handbasket or something like this and they keep on with their dinner plans that are simply dinner and not some manifesto and they are the peaceful ones. The lucky ones.

It.

I'm the one who spends the afternoon chasing down a slippery insight and all I have left is

It.
There is very little peace in that. But apparently there are llamas.

Horrifying children. Check out the poor little dude in the striped shirt.