Showers and Stuff

When I'm in the shower, I tend to do everything loudly. I sing loudly. I talk loudly. I scream loudly. I even think loudly. For some reason, I am under the impression that when the shower is on, no one on this great planet Earth can make out what I'm saying over the drum of hot water.

I get strange ideas in the shower sometimes. Usually, these strange ideas turn into strange stories that I'm quite fond of never finishing. Once, I was inspired by a twenty-minute steaming session to turn my Vicodin-inspired dream about a giant powder-breathing, purple-and-yellow sea horse with wings into a short story that somehow slipped through the cracks of my remarkably efficient filing system of Throw It In A Crate And Stack It Because There Is No Floorspace Left. What I gained from that experience, however, was a valuable piece of knowledge: stuff one does while half-lucid typically turns out less than half lucid.  The ratio's a bit screwy.

I did gain a great deal from my adventures with Vicodin, though, namely that crying hysterically while not on Vicodin will lead an equally hysterical mother to shove strong opioids down my throat. I'm pretty sure that none of this valuable information has stuck in my porous excuse for a brain, however, because Vicodin and steamy, lonely showers aside, I have yet to find a cure for my debilitating Short-Story-Writing  Syndrome. It's some kind of bug.that sometimes seems more symbiotic than parasitic - it gets hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, it doesn't even take a shower to launch rabid ideas into my brain that strike with all the power of John Henry's bulging biceps but twenty pages later disappear without the faintest whiff of a plot.

It's a miserable existence, dreaming up wonderful worlds and people to mold and watch grow and develop before the inevitable sudden return to reality that sees one's imagination whisp away. Can I not grasp them with a tighter clasp? Poe I am not, but that doesn't mean I can't be downright gloomy just as he was.