…didn’t the Lockerbie bomber’s chartered plane mysteriously explode in Libyan airspace?

Seriously. If some rich liberal wants to cut me a big check, I will go to town hall meetings and try to sway senators and Congressmen in favor of nationalized health care. I doesn’t even have to be my representatives. I’m happy to travel, if all expenses are paid. Give me a check with enough zeroes on it, and I’ll lay more astroturf than a football stadium.

I’m college-educated, fit the conservative stereotypes (white, male, from the south), and do not fear public speaking. And I’ve got diabetes, so the health care system affects me directly every single day. I’ve got credibility out the wazoo.

DNC, Soros, ACORN, I don’t care who signs the check. In this economy, I need some supplemental income. If somebody’s giving it away, I’ll take it. I’ll carry signs. I’ll wear silly outfits. I once won an award for chanting. I won’t beat anybody up, but I’d be happy to menace. People tell me I can be menacing.

Come on, left-wing money men! Let me be your protest whore.

I wonder, as total human population increases, will it still require six degrees of separation for everyone to be connected to everyone else? Will it drop to five or increase to seven? If so, when/at what population?

I haven’t written anything of significance in months. Late last year, my computer’s hard drive crashed. Luckily, I have an external drive I use for backup. Unluckily, I hadn’t updated it since April. Luckily, pretty much every word I’d written since April, I’d printed out and read to my writing group. So I don’t seem to have lost much if anything.

But I haven’t strung more than 100 words together fancifully since then. I keep thinking up ideas, premises, settings, even a few scenes. I make notes as appropriate. I look at “How to Write” websites, and decide I know all those tips already.

The short form is, I’m afraid to suck. Which is weird because I thought I was past that. I’m afraid of wasting my time. I know, all first drafts are terrible. And I know the solution is to suck it up and write anyway until it doesn’t suck anymore.

There are so many people out there who are better at it than I am. They’ve got the Seven Universal Plots and the Hero’s Journey and every cool thing Shakespeare ever said all memorized. They can describe an alternate reality Edwardian steampunk New York City street at the drop of a hat, in such detail as to make you smell the coal furnaces.

Me? I do funny dialog and cardboard sets. I wouldn’t know how to tug a heartstring if I could find one. My plots die of option paralysis after about three scenes. I couldn’t begin to tell you how to make a climax climactic.

I’ve heard about workshops, and they scare me silly. I can take the criticism; it’s the production rate I can’t fathom. I know, writing is a skill, and learning to do it fast is part of the skill set. But still, you can have it fast, or you can have it good….

I thought up my first major book idea in college, almost 20 years ago. Still haven’t written it. I still like the idea and take it out to play with once in a while. Those poor characters, stuck in limbo. How do you make a staged magical battle between two wizards who don’t have magic powers exciting?

Eh, I’m just whining. My cerebral cortex feels fuzzy whenever I try to think too hard for recreational purposes anymore. It’s like trying to think through cotton, if you can imagine how that feels.

I coulda been the guy.

I just had an interesting idea for a way to protest the nationalization of health care in America. It’s brilliant in its simplicity, really.

Everyone start calling your local Congressman and Senators, asking for medical advice. Alternatively, call the White House switchboard.

I don’t imagine it would take long to make the point.

It can be annoyingly difficult to plan my meals around what’s on TV when there’s nothing on TV.

They must think it very strange that humans only sleep once a day, but for 7 to 10 hours at a time.

I’m back again to solve the world’s problems in my inimitable style. What do we do with the Gitmo detainees if we can’t keep them in Gitmo anymore? Set them free? Send them home? Let them loose inside America?

We do this. Each one gets a pacemaker. If it doesn’t receive a certain coded signal at an irregular interval, it zaps the heart. If it does receive a different coded signal, it zaps the heart. If it contacts gaseous oxygen or nitrogen, it zaps the heart. If it is electrically disrupted, it explodes and/or releases a toxin into the tissues. It has a battery life of six months, and can only be recharged in a particular way, or it zaps the heart. If the battery dies, something nasty happens. You get the idea. This pacemaker constantly transmits a GPS signal that can be read by satellite and the local cell tower system. The GPS coordinates can be read off the internet.

Having installed these pacemakers, the detainees are released into the general population of the United States.

A reward is to be paid to anyone turning in one of these pacemakers to their local law enforcement agency, no questions asked.

Problem solved.

I’m ready to call the murderer on this CBS murder mystery show.

Except I don’t remember his name; too many characters. Nevertheless, I believe it to be the guy who’s married to the bride’s sister and is boinking her mom. There was a shotgun on the bed in the scene where we found out about the mother-in-law boinking, later used to off the ex-boyfriend of the bride. He just fake-tried to kill the bride to ingratiate himself with the groom, so the groom won’t blab about the affair. Plus, his daughter is creepy.

Okay, I don’t have a lot to go on, but still, that’s my call.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Just… seriously.

Damn, dude.