Losing All to the Abyss

The last two weeks of 2004 threw several wrenches into the machine of my ambition, various holiday related events served to constrain my time and the availability of the computer. Like guests sleeping in the living room so that my shortened sessions needed to be conducted in the dark and on the hush. Hard to opperate a keyboard that way. Hard to copy from handwritten rough drafts and notes or take quotes out of books. Hard but not impossible with one of those little book lights. At least as long as the batteries kept the light bright. But it still cramped my style and made easy tasks difficult and hard tasks ardurous. Yet I persevered because I was full of hope and ambition and expectation of success and assurance of the meaningfulness of my efforts.

Then the Monday after Xmas I woke with a sore throat which soon progressed to a full blown cold with cough and fever. Still I persevered, even though the fever compromised my iffy vision and the cough began to wear me out. Maybe it was the slow accretion of all of this with the final wrench being the news coverage of the Tsunami which seemed to wrench me out of my hope and make my ambition seem pointless. Whatever is to blame, all I know is that this week I am struggling to keep claim to my right to write. Maybe it is the fever taking the fight out of me and carrying those images of the Tsunami waves and the hoards of survivors with eternity in their eyes into my dreams along with the ghosts of all their lost ones, where the clamor of their cries of fear and grief demand of me to justify the relevance of my feeble words, of my frivolous stories and fustian poems, of Joystory even of Joy's story. My only answer is that my words and my story are the only ones that are mine to speak and without them I am as one who has lost everything to the abyss.