So, first things first: I did my 1,000 words on the novel yesterday, and it went okay. I know the general story that I’m trying to get after, but the process will reveal the details, and I can go back and edit it to make it look like it was all on purpose. It kind of took me to a dark place, though. I mean, it made sense within the context that I’m setting up, but I didn’t expect it to go where it wound up. I may have to wuss out, and use a time jump to just narrate the details afterward, as I don’t know if I want go where it is heading. It’s not unreasonable, considering the characters, but it looks like I may have started writing a literary telenovela. If I do this right, I can set up a demonstration of my protagonist’s strength, but if I screw it up, I’ll have to just wipe it all away and try something different. I guess I’ll just have to do it right, then.

So I was thinking back to a graphic novel that I almost wrote about a decade and a half ago: Dr. Death and the Guardian Angel. It was my attempt to put the dangers of the world of methamphetamine abuse into a more palatable context. The insanity and warped storylines were already built in, and the characters I fleshed out were basically caricatures of the people I knew who were living this type of life. Of course, I shelved this idea, along with countless others when faced with the great purge of 2000. And now, the world has taken on a decidedly more boring tone, as the people with whom I currently associate are more likely to throw a fit about watching T.V. than steal a T.V. to score speed. But I really liked the character in the project who was standing in for me.

While everyone else in the story was running around fighting crime with abilities based upon puns about drug usage, the guy who I was writing to be me, was the only non-powered hero or villain in the tale. Didn’t stop him from participating in the action, though. He would run around with his split-personality girlfriend and attack the bad guys with a multi-tool. It was basically what would happen if Batman was a poor kid. Where does he get such mediocre toys? I launched myself into the mythology, and spent weeks writing the histories of this alternate reality while I was looking for someone who could draw. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if I’d ever found an illustrator. Moving on…

It looks like today is going to be laundry day. Half my room is filled with garbage bags of dirty clothes, and my wife is off tomorrow, so I figure that we’ll get the first mountain in the range done today, and save the rest for Thursday. I would have gone and done a little at time over the past couple weeks, but my wife seems to forget that I don’t carry cash since I left my job, and if she wants me to get it done, she should probably leave me at least a roll of quarters. We’re going to slowly unbury ourselves from beneath the things which we’ve collected over the past nine years of life together. It’s amazing how much crap two full grown adults and a kid can manage to acquire in so short a time. I’m not saying that I haven’t contributed, but most of my purchases over the past three years have been digital in nature.

Since she’s been working mornings, and I’ve been here all day, she’s come to notice that the three of us don’t all fit in the room at the same time. We’d managed it without much incident during the years we barely saw one another, but now we’re practically falling all over each other, trying to figure out where everyone is supposed to go. It’s almost like a brief glimpse into how it will be in x amount of years when neither of us is working. I suppose it’s time to think about a second honeymoon, except that we never got to take the first one, so maybe we should try that first. I’m not usually one to advocate for practical, premeditated acts of romance, but our time apart has seeped into every aspect of our lives, and sometimes it feels like we’re just roommates with a kid in common.

By the time that we got married, David was almost three years old, and her daughter had just moved in with us. In the six years we’ve been a married couple, we’ve only spent two nights away from our dear children. The first was when me moved into our current apartment, and the last was three years ago, when we were coming back from the Whiskies of the World Expo in San Francisco. We’ve been so busy trying to make everything hang together, treating our union like some sort of business arrangement. I worked the day shifts, and my wife was working nights. On my days off, I tried to catch up on my sleep, and on her days off, I still never saw her. We arranged our time so that someone might always be there for our son, and slowly began to drift apart.

We have an opportunity to reconnect, and I don’t intend to waste it. I still love her more with every day, and despite the arguments, I feel like there is still a connection between us, something that we can build upon. I love my wife. I love my son. I have the family that I’ve always wanted. And now, at least for a little while more, the time to stop and enjoy them. Maybe before I burn through the last of my credit cards, I’ll take her out for dinner and a movie and check out the least horrible motel we come across. Nothing puts the spice back into a marriage like a conscious choice to leave the black light at home and take a chance.

-Tex