How You Know You're Nuts
You still have your 10th grade term papers. You still have all the notes you and Ilona Wisniewski passed in 12th grade English when you sat bored out of our skulls in that windowless classroom. You still have that fat candle with the three wicks that you can’t light anymore without having it drool all over the place but how can you throw out a thing that came to you as a gift from such a dear of a human being whoever that was? So maybe you're a hoarder and maybe that’s OK because they know what to do with hoarders these days. But you have compulsions too and they’re more of a nuisance.One Example: You just came across a pile of letters you received from readers in long-ago 2004 and your first thought was that you should sit right down and write to them all again. Even though you answered them back then. Another example: ten days ago you lost your diary and without the ability to write things down just so in that particular volume you haven’t been able to feel your feelings at all. Do you find it gratifying that the oil spill is in its 69th day? Hmmmm, a mystery. Are you happy your faraway friend died last Saturday and you never understood that he was dying so you never went to see him? You heard the sudden-stroke-after-surgery part but not the cancer-came-back-which is why they even had the surgery part.This news has knocked you clean off your feet and you just can’t process it. Your psyche is a locked room whose only key is that little leather-bound diary left someplace dumb like in the Ladies Room at Target.Now here it is Sunday and you’re feeling a strong urge to visit the stationery store. Maybe you’re on the brink of buying a new diary and starting over, writing off as lost the last six months. You HOPE you come home with some sort of journal, late as it in the year, because if you show up back here with notecards meant for once again writing all those readers from 2004, well we might as well call in the Crazy Police right now.
