It’s a stark day out.  Cold, clear, windy.  Those last two lines felt like Snoopy starting that novel he never finished.  And let me tell you: the last thing I thought I would mention in my first line here today is Snoopy.  I think I liked Peanuts because it had a dog who flew a plane and had a massive basement.  But that’s about it.  Those kids talked too much. 

Nic sleeps in today (fever) and I’ve gone quietly about my morning routine.  However, the silence that pervades this morning allowed me a little time to think about my usual routine.  Get some exercise, make breakfast, talk about the previous nights sleep quality and dreamscape with Nic, check my email and other such sites, check the weather, hop the shower, dress according to the weather and hit the road.  Nothing so wrong with that routine…except that is was missing one key element: writing. 

I’ve been writing now for seven minutes and the sound is only of the wind outside, the cars on the street and the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard.  And when I stop, the only thing that is noticeable is my thoughts spinning like a car spinning its wheels in a mud ditch.  There is this silence that is deafening, and the internal noise is me grasping and grappling with that next sentence.

I don’t much mind that grasping and grappling, knowing that something will come out of it.  It is a feeling I haven’t had in a while.  Though grasping and grappling may seem like words rife with negative connotation, I find that struggle, that desperation, that cacophony in my head much more appealing than the noise of having checked my email for one more annoying, overbearing message from my boss.  There is no “urgent” question raised in a three AM electromissive by a student about paragraph transitions.  There is no kindly and timely note to return to a family member or a friend.  All these do not exist because I have not yet gone online. 

Purity.  On this quiet morning before I head into the mayhem of rush hour traffic (incidentally, the last time I have to travel at the hour of gridlock here in this city), I find my head clear enough to keep typing, trying to fit as much as I can in this fifteen minutes.  I am over time now, and a flurry of action looms.  I need to pick up the rest of my routine and down another cup of coffee and zoom off to work.  But my moments here tapping have inspired the Zen needed to face the no-blinker lane changers, the frustration of language barrier when explaining why a adjective clause is restrictive or non-restrictive, the first round of bowling championships.  The dread over an idea come and gone without having put it down in writing.