Combat! blog checks essential systems, isn’t useful

A system

A system

Here we are in the after-noon, and Combat! blog has spent the whole day probing its essential systems. This morning I went to the ENT, who passed two hours marrying orifice to object. When I finally got home and fired up Old Lappy, she too was mysteriously ill. I’ve been isolating variables since and can now report cautious optimism. She seems fixed.1 Thanks to the placebo effect, I’m really noticing an improvement in performance. It’s like a whole new machine. Except for the time it took to get it—it would have been much faster to go to Best Buy and purchase a new laptop. But such waste would attract Kardashians, and we eschew it.

Anyway, it’s times like this I’m glad I’m not a doctor, or a software engineer, or any other kind of person who has to be right about problems and fix them. The man of letters has no need for that. He needs only a sharp quill—obviously this is a metaphor for a 2.6 GHz MacBook Pro with wifi for Facebook—a quiet corner, and an idea.

Does he also need tacos? He cannot cook, because his ear canals have been maneuvered and he has been instructed not to look down for 48 hours. It is a burden, but he might have to go to the cajun place inside the bar and eat a shrimp po’ boy. Poor boy! Reduced to eating bugs, basically, and cajun fries. He lives a cajun for his art!

That’s the way writers suffer, and I’ve got to say this combination of expert medical care and consumer electronics has really taken it out of me. Normally I’d suck it up and produce an opus, but I’m dizzy and it’s summer and someday I will die. Probably when it’s cold out. So I’m going to saunter downtown and eat a sandwich, reveling in the kind of Wednesday-afternoon freedom that only award-winning mysteriously ill writers deserve. Mere doctors can only wonder.

While I indulge my laziness—and, importantly, a dash of self-pity—how about you read this Combat! blog from three years ago tomorrow? The quotes are orange and enormous because it predates our current WordPress theme. Sometimes I like to look at old Combat! blogs and try to discern how my writing has changed, and the first paragraph of this one contains a joke I wouldn’t make now. It’s good to be embarrassed by what you wrote before. That kind of progress keeps you from winding up a doctor.

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3 Comments

  1. If you would not make that mouse joke today, I think you need to re-assess the joyless direction your writing is taking you.

  2. I would make all the mouse jokes except for the one about the mouse that gets pregnant and has to go to community college. That joke is too much mean and not enough funny.

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