Slow Drip!

Just a slow drip. At best, I think that's all I've got.

Homes used to say, "Curt! Turn on the faucet! Let it run!"

And I would say, with urgency, "Yes! Turn on the faucet! I will, I will!" And I've been trying, for years now to turn on the faucet. But I don't know. Maybe the faucet is on, but there's something wrong with the supply. Maybe somebody forgot to pay the water bill. Maybe the reservoir dried up, or they took down the dam for environmental reasons and the reservoir just isn't there anymore. Where's the water supposed to come from now? Did they think about that?

Lately, I feel like the faucet is on, but the pipes are just empty.

I just read this, from this:

Think of being curled up and floating in the darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world? The Asian Taoists called it "10,000 Things". And if the darkness just got darker and then you were dead, what would you care? How would you even know the difference?

I should write like that!

And Raymond Carver said this:

"Writers write, and they write, and they go on writing, in some cases long after wisdom and even common sense have told them to quit. There are always plenty of reasons--good, compelling reasons, too--for quitting, or for not writing very much or very seriously. (Writing is trouble, make no mistake, for everyone involved, and who needs trouble?) But once in a great while lightning strikes, and occasionally it strikes early in the writer's life. Sometimes it comes later, after years of work. And sometimes, most often, of course, it never happens at all. Strangely, it seems, it may hit people whose work you can't abide, an event that, when it occurs, causes you to feel there's no justice whatsoever in the world. (There isn't, more often than not.) It may hit the man or woman who is or was your friend, the one who drank too much, or not at all, who went off with someone's wife, or husband, or sister, after a party you attended together. The young writer who sat in the back of the class and never had anything to say about anything. The dunce, you thought. The writer who couldn't, not in one's wildest imaginings, make anyone's list of top ten possibilities. It happens sometimes. The dark horse. It happens, lightning, or it doesn't happen. (Naturally, it's more fun when it does happen.) But it will never, never happen to those who don't work hard at it and who don't consider the act of writing as very nearly the most important thing in their lives, right up there next to breath, and food, and shelter, and love, and God."

I would like to be quoted someday. To feel like I have said something, like my words were important enough to someone that a person wanted to share them with another person.

Maybe if I put a bucket under the faucet, my slow drip will eventually be enough to quench someone else's thirst.

Perhaps one of these days I'll trace the pipes back to the source, see if something is going on down there.