Studio of a restless man

(Reading Time: One minute, 45 seconds)

I pace, smoking an unlit menthol cigarette while standing over the pieces of a collage that don’t quite fit; the fragments need more glue. While I pace Kurt Vonnegut speaks to me from the writer’s workshop in a far off galaxy—or is it Mark Twain? Avoid semi-colons!

I’ve opened the back window and the front door to near hurricane force Wyoming winds: it’s The New York Times piped in along high-tension internet satellites with ‘All the News that’s Fit to Print’. One headline causes me to question where my head of lettuce comes from, if it’s organically grown and picked by a farm worker making at least $15 an hour (workers on my farm will be paid a beginning annual salary of $100,000 with full medical coverage, paid maternity leave, and stock options.) 

Stepping away from the collage, so as to gain new perspective, I take the daily ‘morning quiz’, a form of mental self-medication in which I ask myself two questions I already know the answers to: 1) did Winston Churchill win the Nobel Prize for Literature? 2) was Donald J. Trump actually President of the United States for four years? (Yes and yes.) 

It’s almost time for lunch—a fresh lemon, mineral water, and 800 mg of Ibuprofen served on a bed of tip-of-the iceberg lettuce. 

I touch the collage: the glue is dry, God-bless the glue, the pieces of the collage are coalescing into a patchwork collaboration between Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Lee Krasner. 

 I close the back window and make sure the front door is latched so that it doesn’t blow away and end up in the river, and walk up to the cabin where Wonder Woman is waiting for me.