Waiting.
Waiting on the bus, waiting on Godot? Waiting for the train, the plane, the ride out of here? Waiting on the fish to bite. Waiting on that muse to tickle my fancy. Or tickle anything, so it seems. Got lots of work, just can’t get squared away with it. Can’t seem to triangulate the position. Got a plan, just have no implementation of that plan. So I’m waiting.
Which made me think – the rest of Sister’s “birthday buy-out” caught up with me, the other afternoon. The parcel delivery service dropped it off at a neighbor’s trailer. That Pisces guy was all excited, he thought he was getting a new PowerBook. I had to open the box in front of him, just to prove that there was nothing but dirty laundry in the box. Who are we kidding? I hand carried the new laptop home.
The new printer also arrived. It came with the purchase – a $99 printer with a $99 rebate. Sounds good to me. Not that I needed it, but from what I can tell, it’s basically free. I’ve got to clean, and rearrange some personal effects to make room for the new stuff.
The whole theme of waiting came about because I’ve got another manuscript that needs polish, a thorough edit, and I was thinking about printing it out.
Two items lead to this train wreck of a thought pattern. I’d dug through the cable box, looking for a certain male-female-stereo-microphone adapter thingy, and I stumbled across a modem cable, a mouse for a 1984 Mac, and various other items that I just tossed. Plus, there was some old Apple Talk network cabling.
While I was looking through that manuscript, thinking about doing a hardcopy edit, I remembered the process for writing for the newspaper: go home, right after the event, write the feature, then I would print up that draft copy – on a dot-matrix printer. Carry that copy into the newsroom, and type it all over again. It was old style news, pre-internet and so forth.
The way the dot-matrix worked, it took up CPU cycles, and there was no print-spooling available at the time. Plus, in manuscript form, those articles ran about two pages in the draft mode.
I did something I’m sure I’ll come to regret. I printed out an outline of the manuscript, to go along the 100+ pages of text. Not really a full-on outline, but a checklist to make sure each sign has all the same parts and pieces covered. So far? Less than 33% recycled material. I hope I can keep that up.
What’s it all mean? I’m still in a knot – waiting.
