vitamins for shaky fingers 

 

I was writing carelessly, forgetting all I’d learned from “Elements of Style.”

 

Wrote a short story about thugs that were drunk on luck and home-made  dandelion wine who had replaced their egos with a statue of the Buddha that began:

 

“I was experiencing glandular swelling.  Wore a pompadour and a poncho in  those days.  Very few people befriended me.  Mighta  been cuz I was still sucking my thumb at the age of twenty-seven.”

 

It wasn’t Tolstoy, but at least I spelled everything  correctly.

 

The critics said it was schtick.

 

I got carpal tunnel from writing that f*****g story!  How could it be schtick?

 

When my girlfriend read it, she was sure I had based the female  protagonist on her.

 

“This woman wears a caftan,”  I said. “You don’t even own a caftan.”

 

The next day there was a message from her on my answering machine:

 

“You know how essentially fragile my psyche is…it just doesn’t look good, it doesn’t feel good. So anyway, experiment, explore, play the field, enjoy.”

 

I was knocked down, upset, unfastened.

 

I shouldn’t have stopped writing, but I did.

Couldn’t find my theme, my voice.

 

My form disconnected, my content deformed.

 

I dropped to my knees and started to dream.

 

Somebody was crying.

 

Somebody else was yelling.

 

I was driving a black Chevy Impala and no longer felt like an early spring flower.

 

That’s when I realized that it was called a Complex.

 

In  other words I was getting all crossed-up.

 

That a vertical line sometimes stands for continuous ecstatic love.

 

A horizontal line sometimes indicates a temporal process.

 

And that it takes an eternity to make me despair.