Friday, November 23, 2012

I Do So Love Good Conversation…


You think it's always easy to come up with something to write about here at WYMOP, even just once a week? Sometimes even I have a little difficulty.

What am I talking about, you ask?

Okay... here's the story:

So there I was, driving in to work this morning. I had farther to go than usual since I had gone to a parent/teacher conference at Handsome’s school, so I had more time to think than I usually do during my morning drive.

What was I thinking about, you ask?

Why, this blog of course!

I try to have something to post every Friday evening. This was Friday morning. I had nothing to post.

I repeat: Nothing.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I did have something about half-written, more than half actually, but I didn’t like it. It wasn’t funny.

Just to make sure we all get this straight, I am of the opinion that I am one of the funniest bastards ever to pen a punchline. I may be the only one of that opinion, but if I didn’t think something I’d written was funny then there was sure no way anyone else would get a chuckle out of it!

So there I was driving in and trying to brainstorm an idea all by myself. Now, one of the good things about being a writer is that when you want to workshop an idea (in other words, talk it out with a few people and get different perspectives on it) you don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t even have to make a phone call. You simply turn the idea over to the voices in your head, then turn them loose. They do tend to play ‘Point-Counterpoint’ within the confines of my own head, and that is really cool… but sometimes the voices that are in my head start to slip out into the real world.

Just a little.

How do they do this, you ask?

Why through me, of course!

I call it ‘talking the idea out’, but what it amounts to is that I talk to myself. Hell, sometimes I even argue with myself and it degenerates into name-calling and hurt feelings on both sides. This is pretty awkward when I am both sides.

But I digress. I do that a lot.

So there I was, driving along in full ‘talking-it-out’ mode: good volume, animated facial expressions, head bobbing and weaving while my hands and arms gesture and wave like I’m conducting the Boston Pops. I was just getting to the point where one part of me thought I he was making a cogent and well-thought-out argument while another part of me thought I was full of the sort of by-products you get from a well-fed pony, and a third part of me was reminding the other two, quite forcefully, that I still didn’t have a blog… when something caught my attention.

From the corner of my eye I had seen a pale oval in the car next to mine. The two cars were stopped at traffic lights, next to each-other but facing opposite ways. As I looked over I saw that the oval I’d noticed with my peripheral vision was a face. The face belonged to a girl of about twenty, I think, and she was staring at me. She was also grinning hugely.

My gaze snapped back to my arms, which were extended in front of me, the right one held up so high my hand was actually above my head. My mind scrambled for about a half a second, trying to recall just how the hell my arms had gotten into such a position, but quickly gave it up as a bad job. It didn’t matter anyway, I knew I’d been caught in a complete, full-on, practically shouting conversation with myself.

Not to worry, my brain threw out. I have the perfect out, remember?

I looked directly at the young woman and pointed to my left ear. Over-enunciating to make the message just as clear as possible, I smiled, nodded, and mouthed the words “I’m on the phone!”. The lady in question nodded slowly along with me until my finger touched my ear; my left ear, the one that right up until that precise moment I had assumed held a very visible Blue-Tooth headset. My questing finger, however, found only flesh.

My ear was, quite obviously, empty.

I saw the missing headset sitting on the dashboard in front of me, right where I had tossed it before going in to the parent/teacher conference about a half-hour earlier. I’d automatically reached for it before I realized what I was doing, and by the time I stopped myself it was far too late. I’d picked it up in full view of my audience of one.

Have you ever read about someone being embarrassed, and it said that they ‘felt the flush creeping up their face’? I know exactly how that feels now. I could feel the line of heat moving up over my face as, caught in the obvious lie, I looked once more to the young woman and shrugged sheepishly. My light turned green and the line of cars I’d been began to move. I moved with them, driving away from the young woman.

Her light had also turned green, by the way, and her traffic had also begun to move, though she herself was not driving off.

She was laughing too hard.

Well, I thought as I felt the flush settle evenly over my entire face, at least now you have something to write for the Blog.

Apparently every single voice in my head agreed. Thus:

Ta-Daa!

Talk to you later!

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