I'll follow.

I hate the cold. I hate winters. They always wind down such a long and slippery slope for me, emotionally speaking. 

I'm unemployed this year, which I didn't expect. In hindsight, I wish I could have found myself without work for at least part of the summer, but no, luck is not always with me. There must be a reason. I think it's that I'm supposed to revisit my writing career--possibly with a newspaper again. But I thought today, perhaps not. I thought maybe instead, I'm supposed to work on my semi-autobiographical mostly fictional story. Which I've already started. I just left it there, dying to be told when I hit a bump in the road that not only left my metaphorical tires flat, but my rims bent as well. It's just sitting there, waiting. It's been waiting a long time...

"I know how I hate to wait/Like even for a bus or something/An important phone call/So I can imagine how darned impatient/Everyone must be getting"

So I thought some more. I tried to find a workshop, or maybe a writer's group somewhere around here. You know, for inspiration. Maybe a little boost. Alas, neither seems to exist. So I think this might be it. I just have to do it.

"So I think it's time now/time to reveal myself"

So to make unemployment work for me, I can see now that I should really take advantage of the time and make it count for something. Something bigger than cleaning and cooking to avoid writing because of a stupid bump in the road, especially since said bump in the road is probably fodder for this and any other writing I may do.

Here's a little excerpt of something I wrote before all of this other static came into play:

I wouldn't even want to be stranded with him, if you want to know the truth. He's too moody, too meticulous, and too stubborn. Sometimes he's cold as hell. But we're not on a desert island. We're not even living in the same house or in the same town, and shit, I thought it was worth the trouble. I think he's worth the trouble. There, I said it.

I'd say why, but it's a million little reasons already, which seems impossible, I know.

If you think about it, we've only known each other for three months and nine days, but that's 13,824,000 seconds, so if we only spent 1/4 of that time together, that leaves about 3,456,000 seconds to come up with reasons it's all worthwhile. I'd stop here if I thought I could, but I started this equation, and now it seems like I have to follow it through. I guess you have to figure some of that was sleep time, so take away 1/3 - give or take - and you've still got 2,304,000 seconds to come up with reasons, so a million really isn't that many. On top of that, neither one of us sleeps through the night, so all kinds of possible reasons are probably accounted for somewhere during that half-sleep half-wake time, which I will admit I have trouble remembering. It's all relative, and we're talking seconds, here. Man alive.

I don't think it sounds stupid, because when someone tells you you're beautiful it only takes one second. When they tell you you're brilliant, depending on their diction, it's the same. I'm glad we met, same again. And that's just the words. There are all sorts of things that happen in seconds, in between the minutes and hours that I can't even describe without making us both uncomfortable. Maybe I will one day. For now I'm just going to recount that one really cold night, when he reached over the stick shift of his car and put my heated seat on number 3, then grabbed my icy left hand and stuffed it under his leg to warm it up. Two seconds, two reasons. It's pretty simple math for a now complicated situation.

Sometimes I think if everyone thought about things in terms of reasons and seconds, we'd all be a lot kinder to each other, but I'm not trying to change the world. I'm simply telling a story.

And so on (and on and on). I know I have something in me. Looks like me and my clicky little 50-words per minute fingers are the only ones that will be able to coax it out.

I can't believe I wasted 17 days of unemployment not thinking about this.