Halloween Eve

So, are you going to dress up for Halloween?  I don't think I am.  I'm too old and nobody gives a hoot if I do or don't.  What would I dress up as anyway?  I'm fresh out of good ideas and, looking at my closet, don't have any good raw materials either.  Today's Photo a Day theme is "clothes" (a lame one if ever there was one).  I don't have any interesting clothes and I don't think I look particularly interesting in them.  Look at that nearly unrelenting row of solid colors.  Mostly white too.  I should be ashamed.  I'm not a boring person but you'd never know by looking at my wardrobe--jeans and solid color long-sleeved tees--ho hum.  Now, my socks are another story, but how much do they show in the winter when I'm all bundled up to the eyelids?  Not very much, that's how much.  Huh.  And here I was thinking my vivid personality was shining out there for all to see.  I'm a fraud.  I'm hiding my light under a bushel of drab clothes.  *sigh*  There's always my collection of red shoes (currently 4 pair) but I don't even wear those every day.  Okay, I need to shift my self-perception here, I'm bringing myself down.  Let's see... how about if I gather up all my wacky and shove it... onto the page when I'm writing my NaNoWriMo novel manuscript next month?  Yeah, that's it.  I can... lock my inner-Hitler into a Ball jar and crank down the lid so I can't hear her for the next 30 days.. forget about grammar and punctuation and just let the words flow... be the meanest I've ever been to my characters, no more Mrs. Nice Guy, and fling every bad and bloody and nasty and horrible and icky and just plain mean thing I've ever thought of at her... and enjoy watching her squirm.  Yeah.  I can do that.  Well, I might be able to.  If I really focus.  And keep reminding myself that it's not real.  That no one cares if I'm nice to my characters because they're pretend and not real and won't tell anyone if I'm not nice.  Nice, nice, nice.  I need to get over "nice" and just pucker up and be a bitch.  Let that inner voice that nags and scratches and shrieks OUT.  But confine her to the page.  Because nobody needs to live with the harpy I fear I am inside.  Fear, that's the problem right there.  I'm afraid.  Of success and failure and judgement and myself.  There, I've said it.  I'm a big, fat chicken.  And I don't know if I can overcome it.  *pant, pant*  But I'm going to give it a try.  Again.

October 30--Claude Monet, Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse.  Back and forth, the light swung back and forth making Amy's eyes feel like they were rolling in her head.  "Stop," she said, "stop, stop, stop" but no one came, no one turned the light off, no one reached out to still the swinging bulb.  How long had she been there?  Surely days had passed since rough hands dragged her into the alley on Seventeenth Street.  Someone must have noticed; it was a busy street after all.  Gabe was looking for her.  She knew he was.  He would never rest until he found her and got her safely home again.  She closed her eyes against the swinging light.  Back and forth, back and forth like a bright pendulum it ticked off the minutes in her cell.

Well.  Evidently I decided to start being mean last night.  Good for me, keep it up, Self, you can do it.  Listening to the TV news it sounds like most of us in this upper northeast quarter of the country are getting the stink blowed off (and then some) by Hurricane Sandy which has joined in unholy union with a Nor'easter to beat the crap out of the East Coast, make it snow (snow!) in West Virginia, and even blow the leaves around in our yard which is hundreds of miles from the coast.  Time to hunker down and hold on.  I'm going to Skully's to drink her Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and knit.  See ya.
--Barbara Sue