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Today was an adventure.
From the moment I woke up to get to my PT, I had this sense of foreboding. Be it drinking too much caffeine or too little sleep, but I felt like everything was off-kilter, like some sort of weird Kafka short story, and I could trust no security this Monday promised.
I would have chocked it up to reading too much Martin McDonagh lately, but that was before the goddamed bat attacked me.
I shouldn't say attacked. To be fair, the bat probably didn't have any qualms with me other than, "what the hell is that awful shrieking coming from the other side of this door I'm trying to crawl under?" But that was the point, wasn't it? It was in my space, and it was stretching its little black demon claw under the AC unit's closet door and grasping at air, i.e. me.
I screamed in the animal control lady's ear, which I would have felt worse about, if she'd not been a complete jerk to me on the phone from the get-go.
"There's a bat. A ... a bat."
"A cat?"
"No, a bat."
"Ma'am, where is the cat?"
"It's not a cat. It's a bat, and it's in the A/C unit in my apartment."
"Well, there's nothing we can do about a cat outside in your A/C unit. Is it getting cut up from the blades?"
"I ... what? It's a bat and it's inside and I don't really care right now if it's getting cut up or not and I'm not going to check!"
The bat interjected with a claw and an, "eep!"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
So sad to say, the idea of winning against my anxiety's drama queen tendencies to tell my brain that there was no danger was quickly squashed as my eyes told my brain that a bat was trying to get inside my home.
They took care of the bat while I was out at lunch.
Upon returning, between bats and tired brains and achy legs, I started to come up with brilliant ideas for my book that was not actually all that brilliant, and I realized I needed to ruminate a little more on a course of action before spending a lot of wasted time writing crappy pages that would inevitably end up in the recycle bin.
So this brings me to the real topic of today: What to do when the bats attack and you just cannot sit down and write on your book?
The answer: read another Martin McDonagh play. Read Angela Patten's heartbreaking memoir. Reorganize your desk and bookshelf so you can actually make sense of what is on your bookshelf. Eat pizza. Read articles about things that you need for your characters. Try to figure out how, in the current social climate, your Confederate character who hangs a rebel flag is going to be taken by audiences. He's a nice guy, but yeah, he's got that rebel flag hanging there in that parlor room. And that flag has bothered me from the moment it popped up in his parlor room, but I think it says something about the human condition to have a nice guy with an awful symbol hanging out in his living space, and I want to see where that character goes with the realization of how awful that is. I think that characters need to be complex, and the original thought was that this Confederate character was complicated, but now I just sort of want to take that flag and tear it up and damn complex characters because the real world is too complex right now.
But I guess what I'm getting at is this: sometimes there are just days where bats attack you, and you can either flop around the apartment bemoaning your lack of focus to actually write on your manuscript ... or you can do other things and make room for more writing time tomorrow.
Right after I lay garlic at the bottom of every single door in my apartment. Bats don't like garlic, right?
From the moment I woke up to get to my PT, I had this sense of foreboding. Be it drinking too much caffeine or too little sleep, but I felt like everything was off-kilter, like some sort of weird Kafka short story, and I could trust no security this Monday promised.
I would have chocked it up to reading too much Martin McDonagh lately, but that was before the goddamed bat attacked me.
I shouldn't say attacked. To be fair, the bat probably didn't have any qualms with me other than, "what the hell is that awful shrieking coming from the other side of this door I'm trying to crawl under?" But that was the point, wasn't it? It was in my space, and it was stretching its little black demon claw under the AC unit's closet door and grasping at air, i.e. me.
I screamed in the animal control lady's ear, which I would have felt worse about, if she'd not been a complete jerk to me on the phone from the get-go.
"There's a bat. A ... a bat."
"A cat?"
"No, a bat."
"Ma'am, where is the cat?"
"It's not a cat. It's a bat, and it's in the A/C unit in my apartment."
"Well, there's nothing we can do about a cat outside in your A/C unit. Is it getting cut up from the blades?"
"I ... what? It's a bat and it's inside and I don't really care right now if it's getting cut up or not and I'm not going to check!"
The bat interjected with a claw and an, "eep!"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
So sad to say, the idea of winning against my anxiety's drama queen tendencies to tell my brain that there was no danger was quickly squashed as my eyes told my brain that a bat was trying to get inside my home.
They took care of the bat while I was out at lunch.
Upon returning, between bats and tired brains and achy legs, I started to come up with brilliant ideas for my book that was not actually all that brilliant, and I realized I needed to ruminate a little more on a course of action before spending a lot of wasted time writing crappy pages that would inevitably end up in the recycle bin.
So this brings me to the real topic of today: What to do when the bats attack and you just cannot sit down and write on your book?
The answer: read another Martin McDonagh play. Read Angela Patten's heartbreaking memoir. Reorganize your desk and bookshelf so you can actually make sense of what is on your bookshelf. Eat pizza. Read articles about things that you need for your characters. Try to figure out how, in the current social climate, your Confederate character who hangs a rebel flag is going to be taken by audiences. He's a nice guy, but yeah, he's got that rebel flag hanging there in that parlor room. And that flag has bothered me from the moment it popped up in his parlor room, but I think it says something about the human condition to have a nice guy with an awful symbol hanging out in his living space, and I want to see where that character goes with the realization of how awful that is. I think that characters need to be complex, and the original thought was that this Confederate character was complicated, but now I just sort of want to take that flag and tear it up and damn complex characters because the real world is too complex right now.
But I guess what I'm getting at is this: sometimes there are just days where bats attack you, and you can either flop around the apartment bemoaning your lack of focus to actually write on your manuscript ... or you can do other things and make room for more writing time tomorrow.
Right after I lay garlic at the bottom of every single door in my apartment. Bats don't like garlic, right?
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