Scribble

There is a material world, where they keep things like Hot Wheels tiny cars and telephones and loaves of bread and the Post Office and clothing and TV's -- I've seen it, believe me.

And then there is my head -- where I keep all of that stuff, in a "just add water" form -- and a million other things. I am a writer and that means I am very very strange. I have so many things floating around in my head, even a cast of thousands of people who want to talk and talk and talk and tell me things about their lives.

Like this morning. I went to church. Church is in the material world. They have wooden benches there that they call pews and I was sitting on one and then there was a hymn we sang and then I realized I really wanted to write.

I wanted to find out what my lead character had told her sister in San Diego when she visited her the evening after spending the whole of Friday afternoon in bed with her lover -- a well-known Hollywood producer -- very well- known, too well-known and very married. So she drives down the San Diego freeway to see her sister and brother-in-law, but he's not there but their three boys (her nephews) are and they sit on the beach talking watching the boys.

And I knew what her sister was going to tell her. Her sister knew she was dating the married Hollywood producer and didn't like it one bit, she'd known for more than a year, but now it was going even deeper, because the sister's husband for the first time ever, was being unfaithful to her, no one would have ever taken him for the kind of guy that would do such a thing, and it was a big mess and the two sisters really needed to talk.

All this was happening in my head. I was driving down the 405 south -- near the Costa Mesa exit -- in church in Boston in a wooden pew.

That's the problem. I think the material world is highly overrated. When I have to navigate the material world, I find it extremely irksome some days. It's full of so many things you can just bang into and fall over. I'd rather fly like a spirit through walls. It would be so much easier. So right in the middle of the church service, after the hymn and before the collection plate went around, I got up and went to a quiet enclave where no people were, right behind the chapel, in the balcony with after-dinner mint green carpeting, and started scribbling all the details of the San Diego sister visit on the back of the church program and some other pieces of paper I found that were about doing good works by missionaries in Guatemala or something.

I have to figure it's what God had in mind. To put all these people in my brain. How the hell else did they end up there? My character is so upset to hear her brother-in-law is cheating on her sister, she nearly flips, and of course, she suddenly sees her own messing about with the producer in a new way. I still don't know if she's going to dump him. He IS a bad guy and she's too naive to see it yet. But she will.