Aw, Jilli. I hear you. I have to put together 5 or 6 essays for my proposal, and they're in my head, but my hands are so not cooperating. ita, are you working on that b.org request from Kat to draw thoughts directly from brain into posting box? I could use that.

It's contagious. I have no words! I have two essays need some fixin' and I need to write some new ones and...words? None!

Who the fuck stole all the words? I will have their dictionaries mounted on spikes in front of my Fortress of Writer's Block!

I don't have 'em.

Your words may be stuck in the front of my brain, playing bizarre and intricate games with my words, which seem to be endlessly playing the opening of the next part of Career Change but refusing to leave my grey matter and travel down my arms to my fingers to readability.

Your words are foul corrupters, sir, and they've diverted my perfectly cooperative words into pathways of indolence and nonproductivity. You, sir, have hooligan words.

MM, your words showed up in my brain. Except morphed into a story about Henry and they are killing me! All these interesting words jumbling in my head and I don't have a decent place to write them down yet.

See, hooligan, invader words.

For "Words to Live by" “You have the right to remain silent...of course you do. You’re a criminal.”

Just that fast, my approach to nonfiction changed. Bang. Everything I thought I knew, jettisoned on a summer weekend just thumbing through a book waiting for “Homicide” DVDs to come out and thinking “Cool...true crime I haven’t read” and being surprised that this Simon guy? Could really write, instead of spitting theories or letting the gore or partially dressed bodies tell his tale.Maybe I could write about life without bleaching my voice of all the things that made it good. I had been fooling around with a personal essay for weeks, until it was like a jigsaw puzzle or a bit of cross-stitch I’d never finish, or beads on a string. Just something to pass the time with that would never be done, no matter how long I hovered over it. With a tiny shiver of regret, I deleted it, and let the doubt come and the anger and all the “negative’ and non- narrator feelings blocking my trek between Points A and B. David Simon doesn’t know it, but he gave me words to write by, at least.

Words to live by

"I am no man. You face a woman."

I'd been slouched in a chair, reading LotR for the first time. I was maybe 12, 13. I remember sitting straight up and my feet hitting the floor hard. In this Boys' Own Tale of adventure and danger, here was a woman, by her own decision, strong in her own honor and her own strength, facing down the worst hell her world had to offer and saying, "No, I won't let you." And believing she could back those words up. Or put up as good a fight as would honor anyone.

I don't know what Papa Tolkien intended when he wrote that scene, but those words have lurked in the back of my head for over 30 years, whispering that there are women who are as good as any man and better than a lot, who can look evil in the face and make evil seriously reconsider its options.

oooh ... connie. Yes.

Sidenote - why is it that when people talk about women and honor, they refer to their sexual status alone?

Because we have no function apart from getting fucked and giving birth.

And, possibly, cleaning and cooking, but, really, my culinary honor has been suspect from day 1. Let's not talk about my housekeeping.