inkgrrl's inkblog

As far as the question of whether the writer can change the world . . . this much we know: that throughout history, so great has been the fear of the power of the writer, that books have been burned in the belief that putting the flame to the printed word also destroyed the conviction that lived in the word. –Kay Boyle

Heh. Y’all don’t mind me… I’m off to blow up the world at the Southern California Writer’s Conference. Or something to that effect. There may just be a lot of gladhanding and drinking and bashing of each others’ participles… I’ll let all three of y’all know the gory details when I return.

Still not dead yet, despite not posting. Did Chinatown and watched the Dragon Dance parade in celebration of the Lunar New Year last weekend, saw The Recruit, bought a new laptop (in lieu of eating too much of the aforementioned sharp and crunchy over-sweetened cereal) and am beginning to think (in my writerly quest to find a metaphor to stretch far enough to encompass all of this process) that divorce most resembles watching a loved one die of a terminal illness.

Not sure what stage of the grieving process I’m in now – it’s no longer denial as everything hurts too much – but I’m doing a good job of hunkering down and not talking to anyone unless they approach me. Not to shut folks out on purpose… it just hurts. I know that eventually it won’t, so much, and then even more eventually it’ll hurt less and less until finally I can watercolor over the Kodachrome memories and just look back one day and say, yeah, I was married once to this really great guy who’s now a famous artist.

And that will be it.

But for now every day is letting go of one more thing, acknowledging one more last time for something – if he moves out this weekend then this morning will have been the last Wednesday morning that I’ll wake up to greet him over coffee and CNN. And so on, like that. Not sure if it serves me to think of things that way (as my cynical forebrain mutters that it reeks of melodrama and purposeful angst) but at least I’m paying attention, which (speaking from experience) is ultimately better than denying what’s happening in the moment that it happens and then getting whacked upside the head with an emotional 2″ x 4″ a few months or years down the line because I just wasn’t paying attention at the time things were actually happening. I’m too lazy to properly hyperlink any of the pop-cult or other references above… sue me.

When good ideas go terribly, terribly bad… well, usually when you mix alcohol and explosives. Sometimes it can be fun to point and laugh at the results, though. Or is that just mean? Nah.