Idea Garage Sale: Being There. Or Not.

For years, I thought our family was waiting to change planes at D/FW airport on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

We were not. I had conflated a couple of different family stories and tied them together with general historical knowledge to come up with a single coherent narrative more interesting than reality.

Because that's what I do. Only on this occasion I had no idea I was doing it and was accidentally lying to people, which is never my intention. I was also being sort of precognitive, as I was in fact waiting to change planes in D/FW the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

A lot of history has happened during my life, and I'm seldom there for it. It happened again this week - I could have been in the gallery at midnight shouting behind Wendy Davis, but I wasn't. I could be in Austin on Monday, rallying again, and have the feeling I ought to be - but the world spun around my head a little this morning and I bet I don't. I sometimes feel bad for not being a history-making sort of person, even in the mass-movement background sense. If I can support a cause by clicking links, signing petitions, and occasionally donating money, I will; but my attempts to hit the streets always fizzle. Moving with large groups of people - I can't do it. But that's not the point of an Idea Garage Sale, and the point is this:

We are all alive in history. We don't have any long perspective on it, and many of us who are interested in history find current events annoying and exhausting. That's because we can't get closure on it, and because so many people who are into current events, particularly the kinds of people who start petitions and lead rallies, are pretty annoying and exhausting, themselves. (Well, they have to be, don't they?) But current events become history more quickly than we guess; and we begin unconsciously making story of them long before they are suitable for "historical novel" treatment.

What happens if you stop being unconscious about this process?

I have done this once, in Switching Well. The concept didn't work if I didn't anchor both ends of the story firmly in a specific place and time; and the only possible way for me to anchor the "modern" end properly was to set it during the time I was writing it. But that time hurried away at time's usual relentless pace, so I had to diarize intensely, observe things I would normally have noted in passing, follow the news, and generally pay attention to things I otherwise would not have, in ways I otherwise would not have. Even by the time Switching Well was published, its "present" was two years in the past; and now, twenty years - twenty years! - after its first publication, it is the story of two girls swapping places from one point in the past to another point in the past.

And this is a strength because, even though I came across causes worth fighting for in the course of writing that book, I didn't fight for those causes in the book. Ada and Amber weren't in position to reform the child welfare systems they got caught in. They could only deal with them, and do a good turn to one or two other people. Which is all most of us ever manage. If people who read the book internalize some awareness of the perpetual inadequacy of child welfare systems in the United States along with the rhythms and textures of daily life in 1891 and 1991, good. It will be because I told the truth as plain as I could tell it and they did the rest.

You can tell the truth, too. Look back in your life. What bits of it rise up and become history, and what were you doing then? What's happening now that will become history by the time you can finish writing a book? How is that history working away to change your life even as you ignore most of it?

What literary capital can you make out of that, setting passions and causes aside, and viewing it from four feet above street level, where a child protagonist's eyes are?

Stop trying so hard to be universal, for a minute, or a book. You will only ever achieve the universal through the particular, so sort through your life. What are your particular parts of history? What happened to you in the cracks between the big events?

What could have happened?

Rat Hard vs. Driving Hard

Once, I had a year from hell. So did everyone around me. That was one of the things that made it so hellish.

I had to finally learn to drive during that year, because Damon was too sick to do it and we couldn't afford to be dependent on our friends - who were also having hellish years and none of whom lived within a mile of us - for rides to the doctor. I found it enormously difficult, but I operated on the presumption that if I had to do something, I could do it, so I took driving lessons.

During the early part of that year, our cats, who are the worst hunters in the world, double-teamed a rat, chased it all over the house, and mortally wounded it. This was all deduced from forensic evidence - I had to clean up the rat blood. At first we assumed that the rat had eventually gotten away, but in a few days we realized that it had been mortally wounded. And died. Somewhere in the downstairs hall closet where Damon keeps his comic book boxes.

Damon at this time was bedridden, so while he slept I got into old clothes and rubber gloves, gathered "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction," and started taking the closet apart. Cleaning up deceased animals has always been Damon's job because I am a wimp, but I told myself I had to do this, so I could do it, so I gritted my teeth and got on with it.

And then I found the rat. And I couldn't.

I tried. Honest, I did. But it was as if a physical force field went up between me and it. I tried till I cried and I could not make myself do it. I couldn't even make myself use one of the long implements, much less reach into the closet with my rubber-gloved hands. After the first glimpse, I couldn't make myself look into the closet. I finally had to admit to myself that I had reached the limits of my strength and there was nothing to do but ask someone else to do the job I couldn't.

So I called M, our old housemate, who is completely unreliable about daily things like taking his turn at the dishes and getting his junk out of the high-traffic area and showing up on time for - anything - but who is completely reliable about responding to anyone he can interpret as a damsel in distress. M, I knew, would be delighted to clean up a dead rat so he could be my hero, if he happened to be at home. Which he was not. And his wife, who might or might not have been able to deal with a dead rat under normal circumstances, was home with the baby and a cold. But his brother happened to have dropped in on her, and he cheerfully came and cleared out the rat for me and I never had to look at or smell the thing again. And I had a new term in my personal vocabulary. A thing that is "rat hard" is too hard for me to do, even when I have to, and when I run up against that, then there's no point beating myself up about it. I just have to find another way.

The day after I discovered my limits that way, I had a driving lesson. We were getting down to the wire on the number of lessons I had left, and the instructor was teaching me to parallel park. This is a crucial skill to learn when driving in Texas, because if you can do it, you'd pretty much have to run over somebody to fail the rest of the test, and if you fail that, you fail the whole thing. Parallel parking is the first item in the test procedure and if you fail it they stop the test right there and you can go home to practice parallel parking some more. So we were out there in the empty parking lot with the cones and the imaginary Mercedes on either side and the problem was that I can't see straight.

It was before I learned why I can't see straight, but I'd known for years that I can't and it's one of the reasons I'd never bothered getting my license. However, I'd been walking under the influence of this peculiarity for most of my life and I found that most of my compensatory habits served me just as well in the car as when walking - until it came time to go in reverse. I was hopeless at going backwards. I couldn't tell when I was straight, I couldn't tell when I was turning, I couldn't tell where the bumper was, and I hit one or the other imaginary Mercedes every time. We spent half an hour just working on reversing and I just couldn't do it right.

At which point I put my head down on the steering wheel and told the instructor about the rat, ending the story with: "But this isn't like that. This is something I can learn to do."

And eventually I did do it, though it'd be a bit much to say I learned how to parallel park. I took me three tries to pass the driving test and I still can't line myself up parallel to and within the correct distance of the curb without someone outside the car giving me hand signals. In the eight years since then I've parallel parked "in the wild" exactly once - but I did it without hitting the other cars and that was all I asked of myself.

So that was another addition to my personal vocabulary. Impossibly steep learning curves are only "driving hard," and at the end of a horrible spell of failing and trying again and crying with frustration and failing and trying again and failing and crying and failing eventually, if I don't throw in the towel and declare defeat, I will get it done.

So the first question I ask myself when faced with something that's too hard is, Is it rat hard, or only driving hard? Because if it's rat hard, I need to stop wasting time and find the way around it; but if it's driving hard, it's time to move on to the second question; which is, How bad do I want it? Is it worth the effort and frustration and stress of learning to do it? Because if it's not, I need to stop wasting time working at it; but if it is, I need to get on with it.

I have never met a creative problem that was more than "driving hard."

Whether this story and this distinction do you any good, I don't know. Here they are for what they're worth.

Some Things Don't Change

In a lot of ways it was easier to get things into the mail when all I had to work with was outdated print resources speaking in general terms. These days I keep up with the deal news from Publishers' Marketplace and read all the high concepts of all the new deals and think: "Agh, that sounds awful! The person who bought that won't want to even look at my stuff," or sometimes, "Agh, that's the high concept of the book I'm trying to mail! The person who bought that has already bought the only lesbian western he's going to be allowed to buy this year!" about every single entry.

Which isn't true, or not always, and in many of those cases I need to suck it up and send the query anyway, but I know that in the same way that I knew, in high school, that I could get the research paper in on time, with all the footnotes placed correctly, and get a good grade. It was intellectual knowledge only. I didn't believe it in my gut, which was convinced the only way I was going to get an A was if I could write the paper amusingly enough that the teacher read it indulgently and overlooked the glaring errors in footnote formatting (which I was doing on a manual typewriter - don't miss that!), bibliographic depth, and interpretive subtlety.

Which was a pretty constructive misapprehension on my gut's part, now I come to think of it. Now I'm older I know that lots of people wrote stone-cold boring papers and got A's, while I was getting an A+, a red-pencil smile, practice in good writing habits, and the enmity of my peers (which would have been mine even if I'd written poorly so, to heck with it) for being a teacher's pet. My gut is much less useful in parsing the current market.

I guess we don't get better at everything as we grow older.

Which isn't where I planned to end up when I sat down, but it'll do, since I'm crashing kind of hard.

Idea Garage Sale: Make-up Magic

A kid/teen with a self-image problem - unfashionable figure, "ugly" (i.e. distinctive) features - has an acting ambition centered around "everybody's natural desire to be somebody else." Plagued by envy, thinks like a victim. Fascinated by make-up artistry, big fan of the Lon Chaneys, but doesn't understand the predeliction to make monsters. She wants to create perfection.

The make-up kit is an entirely neutral magic item, does exactly as asked, and can be cleaned off - possibly only with the cold cream that comes with, though. That depends on whether you prefer a scene where her identity starts to run in the rain, or one in which she wants to erase a failed ideal self and is almost out or can't find the jar. Try for beauty, try to be someone else, try out the opposite sex; eventually try out a monster identity as a means of expressing her increasing frustration.

The biggest problem for the author is wrapping up satisfactorily without being trite. Teens and kids are always being told to be themselves, and responding mentally (as I used to respond): "But what if yourself is somebody nobody likes?" There's no point saying such things out loud to grown-ups - all they do is tell you that's not true, like that should help, which it doesn't.

The biggest problem for me is, I don't use make-up. I never have. I don't know what most of it is for, or why you'd want to muck your skin up with it. It's made of dirt, you know! The closest I've come to stage make-up was smearing all visible skin with gray pancake to play a rock gnome in a LARP. I could research the matter, of course; but it's not intrinsically interesting to me.

By the way - the way I solved this problem? Went to college, discovered RPGs, became Queen of the Geeks. Not practical advice for a ninth-grader.

Oktoberfest Blogfest: Bilocating Kitten

Since I signed up to join Bish Denham's Blogfest, involving posting a short ghostly experience, I reckon I better get on it.

This is a true story and the weirdest thing that ever happened to me.

Some years ago, we had orphan kittens. We were alerted to their existence by the agonized cries of the smallest, most-loudmouthed one, who was also the first to try to climb out of the box even though her eyes were glued shut by infection. We called her Intrepid. She was a dark gray tabby. She had two sisters, a dark gray tabby with white feet (Whitefoot), a black (Ford; she was an Explorer), and gray with a white chest (Pogo; he looked like a possum).

We kept them in the sunroom so our big cats wouldn't molest them and contract their fleas, fed them with an eyedropper, combed the fleas out of them, and washed their poor infected eyes regularly with saline solution. Before the recent reconfiguration of our back porch, the three rooms - laundry room, powder room, sunroom - were all connected to each other by doors, with entrance to the main part of the house from the kitchen to the laundry room and from the dining room to the sunroom. Once the kittens started moving around on their own, I would utilize the powder room as an airlock, entering through the laundry room, closing the door behind me, and then opening the door to the sunroom. But none of the doors closed very well.

One night I woke up and saw Intrepid, or possibly Whitefoot, on the foot of the bed. I sat up and she pounced into the mass of covers pushed down there - it being June and too hot to sleep with the covers up - so that I had to fish around for her. I couldn't find her. As I woke up more I realized that, even had one of the felines in the house gotten the door to the sunroom open, a kitten who could barely climb out of a box would have had to cross the dining room and kitchen, climb the steep back stairs (each riser taller than any of the kittens at full extension), cross the landing, climb the second flight of stairs, cross the hallway, and climb onto a waterbed frame with no help from a dangling bedspread. It wasn't possible. This was a hypnopompic hallucination - essentially, my body had started to wake up, but my brain had continued dreaming for a short time.

Not a big deal.

Next day (possibly my memory conflates events and it might have been several days later), the kittens were lively and I had to move back and forth between the powder room and the sun room several times in the course of tending to kittens, so to restrict the time they spent underfoot I put all of them on the bench seat in the sunroom while I went to the bathroom to get what I was after. By the time I turned around, I had kittens in my way. Intrepid in particular seemed anxious to get stepped on - while Ford and Pogo chased each other, she was directly where I needed to step. So I gently lifted her aside with my bare foot under her belly, laughing at the way her little black paws clawed the air on either side of my instep, and returned to the sunroom - where I found Intrepid, too small to jump down, standing on the edge of the bench seat meowing frantically.

None of the kittens, at this point, could climb onto the bench seat without assistance. Even Pogo, the biggest and strongest, had to use an intermediate box placed next to it to get himself up. Yet there she was. But I had felt her furry belly across my instep. And although it was easy to confuse Whitefoot - currently at the base of the bench seat - with Intrepid, I had specifically seen that the kitten I lifted had dark paws.

I have no explanation for this. I only tell you what happened.

Intrepid was the only one of the kittens who died. She never gained weight past 6.5 ounces, never got weaned. She died while I was on an out of town school visit, probably of hypothermia in the middle of June in Texas, because her body couldn't retain heat and the other kittens no longer stayed in the box insulating her.

I don't know if that is relevant.

Weird things happen, that's all.

Idea Garage Sale: The Beaten-Down Path

Rain, rain, beautiful rain! It rained last night and it's raining now and it should rain for the next two days, which should make everyone happy, but people are going to grip about it. I never have taken the gloomy view of rain that most folks do - I'm a plainswoman, experienced in drought, and due to certain peculiarities of my system I am sensitive to atmospheric pressure, so rain starts out as a relief from drought and discomfort and has to go on for a long, long time to become oppressive to me. I wear short skirts and go barefoot when I have to go out in the rain, because skin dries faster than cloth. You can put your shoes on when you reach your destination and be dry and comfortable all day, instead of squelching around in wet feet with wet pants flapping around your ankles. Men, poor things, seldom have these options. Men generally get shafted in the sartorial department.

All this is every day common sense - to me. Yet the weight of culture is against me and I have yet to convert even one person to the barefoot-in-the-rain habit, though many people have seen the benefits in action. Received wisdom is an ogre that can only be ground away at slowly, over time, so gradually that people don't notice their habits changing and in many cases will deny that their habits have indeed changed. If you show them a truth that is too far out of their accepted way of thinking, they will not recognize it.

That's why what used to seem to me to be an obvious method of story generation does not often generate saleable stories. Inside of every cliche, I believed - and for what it's worth, I still believe - lurks some good story that has been overlooked due to the tendency of minds, like feet, to follow the best-worn trackway. If you turn a cliched idea on its head, explore it from a different angle and forge a new path through it, you should be able to provide the editor with the "fresh take" they're always asking for, while providing the public with the familiarity they have consistently displayed their willingness to spend money on.

I have a number of notions like this in the back file. Like this one (from internal evidence, this cannot date from later than 1985):
"There are Rules, Ms. Czimzik." Susie Czimzik answers an ad for a secretary for the Luz Finance Co. Although the company occupies the entire 13th floor of the Tower Life Building, she is the only clerk. Mr. Luz has agents, but they are not friendly. The company loans money on peculiar principles and has odd employment requirements; however, Susie finds Luz himself charming at first; besides, she needs the job. In course of time, she needs a loan, but has no collateral. Mr. Luz offers to do her a favor and let her have what she needs for nominal collateral - her soul. The loan is set up so that she cannot pay it back; realizing this, Susie comes gradually to realize who Luz is, and falls into despair - until an old lady - a derelict, slightly off- quotes the eleventh hour scripture to her and she realizes that the contract is invalid by nature.

Why exactly so few writers who profess the Christian religion notice the logical implications of that eleventh hour dogma for the old-fashioned "Deal with the Devil" plot, when it looks so obvious to this agnostic, is not a question subject to my answering. I think most of the time when we see this story, it is set up more as an exercise in Schadenfreude than anything else - the writer, and the audience, prefers punishment to redemption for the central figure, and the consolations of religion be damned. But it's not for me to say how anybody else's process works.

I never got any farther on this story than the above. My main interest in it, really, was to set a story in the Tower Life Building, which is one of the prettiest skyscrapers you will ever see (for my money, prettier than the Chrysler Building) and, of course, has no 13th floor.

I couldn't figure out how to do it without its appearing to be an attempt at evangelism. I'm not evangelical at all, and living where I do, I am all too aware of how violently people (including Christians!) who are used to the clumsy attempts of streetcorner preachers to evangelize them react to any hint of that. But even if I had solved that problem, and created Susie Czimzik as a more than usually attractive character, and played carefully with every tired trope I wanted to play with - the moment most editors realized it was a "Deal with the Devil" story would be the moment they stopped reading. The moment the rest realized that I'd broken the rules of the storyline would be the moment the rest of them rejected it. The path of the cliche is worn too deeply in our collective brains. The ones with the patience to wait around to see if you deviate from it are the ones who like this cliched path, and prefer not to deviate from it.

The problem is far from insurmountable. I've surmounted it a few times, myself. But it's tricky; and you have to read a lot of cliched stories to figure out how to subvert them acceptably.

Idea Garage Sale: This Thing About Dwarves

(Note the technically incorrect plural. If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me. The man wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.)

I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.

Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.

Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.

I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.

Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.

The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.

I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.

And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.

There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.

But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!

Idea Garage Sale Challenge: Laundromat!

Challenge to the reader: Show me up. Generate a story idea set in a laundromat. No limitations on form, genre, practicality, anything.

I tried. I did. I sat there for an hour and a half this morning. It was hot, unless you happened to stand right under the vent. A maximum of four people were there at one time. Two washers had wet loads in them from the time I arrived to the time I left. The book I'd brought was too by-the-numbers to engage me and I knew I needed a Garage Sale idea so I thought about it. But I could not put a story there.

Last week a guy bummed some change off me to use the facilities, refused my offer to share soap, then wandered around with his bundle of laundry for another hour at least, presumably bumming more change. I know, I'm a sucker, but I do a quick cost/benefit analysis in such cases. If the guy really is fresh out of the hospital, too poor to do laundry, and just wants to wash his clothes, the benefit to him of getting $4 in quarters in incalculable. If he's scraping together drug or alcohol money, the cost to me is $4 and an addict thinking I'm a sucker. I can live with that. But I couldn't go anywhere with the guy, imaginatively. He wasn't enough of a character - probably by design, as it is to a panhandler's benefit to be unmemorable.

Also last week, there was a cute little girl who could run but not talk yet, whose mother didn't talk to her and handled her, not abusively, but with what seemed to me excessive brusqueness and too little attention. She sat next to me for awhile, playing a game where she sneaked up on my insulated cup and I snagged it away at the last minute, whereupon she laughed. Normally in these situations the mother will make eye contact with the person interacting with her child, but not this woman. I don't think I want to know the rest of this story. I don't think I would like it.

When I was in college, my first lover lived in an apartment a few blocks from campus and I would take his laundry to the laundromat down the street. Yes, I did his laundry for him. I was also the only one who ever defrosted his freezer or cleaned his bathroom, and the one who dug the obstruction out of the drain under his perpetually running faucet (instead of working on the drain or calling the landlord he set a bucket for the overflow). He was ten years older than me. The best thing I can find to say about him these days is, that he allowed me to get most of my life's mistakes out of the way in a 9-month period. Once when my best friend from high school came up to visit me she joined me on the laundry expedition (where was he? I don't remember) and as we stood in front of the plate glass window a man on the other side got our attention by tapping on the window with a joint and offering, in gestures, to share it with us. We declined. There's a story there, but I dodged it!

A few years later, I found myself in the laundry room of the barracks at Kelly AFB, where Damon was living, folding clothes next to another girl whose boyfriend lived there. And I remembered all the girls I knew in college who did their boyfriends' laundry along with their own in the dorms. Doing a guy's laundry is one of the ways American girls say "I love you," or at least it was 30 years ago. And there's a story there, too, but - I don't think I can go there. I'm not sure why.

(When we have a washer and dryer, for the record, Damon does almost all the laundry these days. It's just developed that my being the one to sit in the laundromat is the best division of labor for us every weekend so far.)

Even before that, in high school, one of the first short stories I ever finished was titled "Laundromat." It was, I now know, "minimalist," but I'd never heard the term at that time and am not positive the minimalist literary fad was even a gleam in the literary market's eye. It would have been 1978, '79, in there. It was about a guy trying to pick up a girl in a laundromat, and I was proud of it because it was told almost wholly in dialog. If I ever turn up a copy of it, and it's half as bad as I remember (and there was an upper limit to how good it could be, given my limited experience at picking up and being picked up), I will either destroy it in shame or post it here as an example and encouragement to others that yes, they can get better over time. I won't pledge myself either way. If there is a story to be gotten out of a laundromat, this wasn't it.

Once upon a time it would have bugged me that I couldn't do this set task in an hour and a half. It doesn't any more. I haven't lost the facility, and I still believe there's a story to be found. But this particular Sunday, I stalled out. Yeah, it's technically two weeks in a row, but everybody has dry periods. And as a Texan I know how dry periods end - in floods. So I know it won't last, and knowing that is half the battle.