Yesterday the blank page mocked me.

Today the ideas crowd around me like hungry cats.

Did I pick the right one?

Am I going in the right direction?

No one around to clue me in because here I am God.

A flawed, confused God who often leads characters astray.

Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, chasing an ending that won’t happen.

Stopping. Cutting my losses. Copying blocks of text into a morgue file.

Start again.

Isn’t it time for lunch?

© Remington Write 2021. All Rights Reserved.

In 2019, my burn-the-candle-at-both-ends partner organized two major trips for us. This was the first: Ten days crossing Spain and Portugal from sea to shining sea. We started in Barcelona and finished the trip in Lisbon.

My parents were Depression Era kids. Grama Remington used to talk about how Daddy and his brothers didn’t have shoes in the summer to save money. What scarred my parents got handed down to us kids. There was a constant, subconscious certainty that there wasn’t enough. Four kids, two baths. Who left that light on? Do you really need to stand there with the refrigerator door open all day? Keep your hands off the thermostat! If you’re cold put on another sweater.

Add to that the fact that I was coming of age when environmentalism and its kissing cousin, anti-consumerism…

Lucky Davis wished people would stop calling him that. He blamed his wife. Darlene, she had a good heart and was a kind neighbor and a great mother but the woman could not keep her mouth shut. So he got out of a speeding ticket the same day that the numbers he’d been playing for eighteen years hit to the tune of $230,000. Yes, lucky. But come on. And his name was Martin, dammit.

That was also the week he lost his job as head of security at the warehouse down by the docks that burned down. …

What’s left after our year of death and loss? Not Sammy’s. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about this. Sorry to see Sammy’s go. The food wasn’t so great although the cold sesame noodles were quite tasty. The cranky wait staff and the string of dead ducks in the window, though, those will be missed. So Sammy’s is gone and so is Gem Spa and the Good Stuff Diner as well as countless other businesses that weren’t up for the trials of the past year.

I can’t find proof of it but I seem to remember that Gem Spa…

I’m an atheist who prays and a determined go-getter who loves being out of work. Don’t try and slide any of that woo-woo stuff my way. I’m practical. I’m alert and clear-eyed. I would never throw perfectly good flowers into the trash for example.

But I also go out of my way not to step on those gas caps set into the sidewalk — bad luck — but to step on the ones that have the word water on them — good luck. I try not to step on sidewalk cracks. I hurt my mother enough while she was alive…

Asha loved storms almost as much as her Nanna hated them. No one on the planet loved anything to match the fervent fear and hatred that Nanna had for storms. Asha’s mother explained that it was because of the typhoon that swept Nanna’s home and family away when she was a girl in the Philipines.

“That would do it.” Asha nodded and felt bad for teasing Nanna.

The clouds beginning to rise and darken were Nanna’s signal to rush around the enormous pre-war apartment on Central Park West, closing windows. Asha would wait until Nanna had made her rounds and…

Was I always like this? Maybe. I don’t remember now. But I can almost hear the ticking and dings that go on all the time. Every person I speak with, every door I walk through, every choice I make every day gets ticked through my never-resting story-seeking brain. And a remarkable number of these events turn into ideas that turn into stories. Sometimes very good stories. Not always.

I’m like a truffle-hunting pig and stories are my truffles.

So seeing, of all things, a Bitcoin ATM in, of all places, a tiny store at the corner of West Houston and…