will

you watch the hours tick by on a clock you're not sure is keeping time any longer. the sound is enough to drive you crazy: tick. tick. tick. tick. you wait for something you're not sure is coming. you wait for something you're not sure you're waiting for.

eventually, the little hand is somewhere between the four and the five, and you've all but given up. you have given up, on sleep at least, but not on the idea that whatever it is will arrive. maybe it will come by the front door. so you rise, put on your coat and hat--maybe it will recognize you by your hat; maybe it will pass you by if it doesn't see your face--and take the notebook from beside your bed.

the streetlight doesn't know what it permits. it doesn't ask. it doesn't care. it casts its cold white light indiscriminately. it can't read. it can't pick up the pages you leave scattered on the sidewalk. it realized this long ago, so it stopped being bothered. now it does all it can do, and it shines. a poor substitute for the sun, it knows, but it also knows it's the only one you've got.

it doesn't much matter what marks you make on the paper in front of you. some are words, some are sentences, some are childlike scribbles that not even your parents could decipher. maybe you are writing the treasure map for it. telling it where to find you. maybe you are lamenting the departure of sleep, in a language only it would understand. maybe you are telling your own story, or maybe you are realizing that you no longer believe you have one to tell. the sidewalk dutifully collects all the pages of your sometime-memoir, binding them loosely with concrete. the streetlight, your studious librarian, knows every page of every book she has seen but never read.

at least the ticking has stopped.

image: Will Eisner, Frontispiece from A Contract with God, © 1978 Will Eisner. accessed from the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/images/eisner1s.jpg on 19 Feb 2010.

ekphrasis

she sat, locked in a tower room from which she could easily free herself, pondering whether the nearness of things made them less interesting. the ploughman with his horse--as familiar as a brother, and as distasteful. the lonely shepherd with his sheep--each conversation seemed longer. only the ships in the bay began to seem attractive, with their freedom of movement and unfamiliar culture.

and the sun--the sun on the horizon, tempting the mountains to fall into the sea. she wondered: how many ships have followed it over? how many men have dropped to the depths, all in search of the sun? the sun and the stars in a constant game of chase, one continuously trying to find the other, both always escaping. she was locked beneath a cosmic battle whose participants cared none for collateral damage.

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whoever suggested this one thought you were quite clever, didn't you? ;)

project idea:

i'm tired and meandering around the internet, and i landed on etsy.com at the shop of Sophie Blackall. having no attention span, i didn't bother to read in any detail about her Missed Connections project, but it appears she took craigslist missed connections posts and illustrated them.

and i thought, gee, i wish you could do that with writing.

illustrators can take a word or a phrase or a story and turn it into visual art. why can't i take an image and turn it into a story? a picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

and then the idea struck: go to google images, find any random picture, and write a sketch on it.

by "sketch" i mean "a short piece," mostly because i'm in that part of winter where my creative energy is, well, gone, and i'm looking for things to jumpstart it and make me write something. anything. also, the aforementioned short/absent attention span.

so here's what i need from you:
post a comment containing any word (or words, if you're feeling spicy) that you want to see me image search and subsequently sketch. the more abstract, the better.

no promises, just good (?) intentions.