An idiot walks out of a bar

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping so I listen to British news all night. I find their silly voices soothing and boring, and I drift in and out of sleep and have dumb hybrid half-dreams where I’m a Ukrainian soldier whose cat named Cindy Lou Who (my cat’s name) is bitching for food in the middle of the night. It’s a living.

I can’t imagine what the radio did to prompt the excellent dream I had the other night. I think I dreamed I wrote a children’s book about a small elephant who ran around Washington DC stealing cherry soda. It’s possible I also just dreamed about the elephant and added the “wrote a book about” part upon waking to somehow make it about me. Either way, what a delightful concept.

Like all decent cat owners I have fun inventing stories about Louie. She is usually some kind of shady small businesswoman or detective. I considered writing about her fake adventures years ago but decided against it mostly out of laziness but also because I love children’s books and dread being the sort of failed writer who makes disrespectful assumptions about how easy it must be to crap out a couple hundred words about, say, an elephant who steals soda.

I don’t consider myself a failed writer, by the way. I’m not a very ambitious or competitive person, and I understand how talent and math work. I’m pretty good at writing and have had a handful of small to medium successes with it in fits and starts through the years. That’s pretty successful! Plus hey who knows, maybe next year’s my year to win a pulitzer. It could happen. It was never likely of course and I didn’t spend a lot of energy thinking about it, but in the darker days it was a comforting daydream about something that wasn’t technically impossible.

The thing is, though, I stumbled the wrong way out of the New Republik soft opening last January in a literal blizzard and I got frostbite on both hands. I was hospitalized for 4 or 5 days and I don’t think I was out of the woods amputation-wise until the last wound finally closed up sometime in April or christ possibly May. But I made it—all my fingers are intact and look 90 percent normal and work 90 percent normal. I have good insurance and a great wife who got me to the ER in time, and I got lucky. But the bitch of it is the two lingering effects 10 months later are stiffness, which who cares, that’s just like early onset arthritis; and intense fingertip sensitivity. I can do basically everything fine except type.

It’s cruel. I can edit drug company marketing bullshit just fine all day, because that’s only using a mouse and typing curtly, plus they pay me and work is supposed to suck anyway. But to get into a good recreational ramble after hours was out of the question, I thought until just now when I actually forced myself to try it. Turns out the barrier is largely psychological. It hurts but I can fight through it and I wasn’t sure I could, and I guess I was afraid to try, because if it didn’t work then I had to officially give back that part of my identity or mission, what have you. I only ever wanted to be a writer and as great good fortune would have it I am one.