And now, something exactly the same, yet totally different.

(I wrote this a few months ago as an exercise in dicking around with words. More importantly, it is the first time I've ever looked at something I've written after a few months and actually liked what I had made, unfinished though it may be. Ironic as all get out.)

Sometimes I just want to write, but my vocabulary is waning. I feel daily the strains of the anchor tugging from below, pulling against the ebb tide, so close to shore, yet so futile. I’m not getting pulled under, but I’m stuck on that goddamn reef. I must kill to free myself from the doldrums. Throw the horse off the boat and see what happens. Maybe the fucker will chew the rope off and the surf will deliver me to land.

But again, misplaced imagery and stale metaphors cannot help me escape the fact that I simply cannot write the way I want. I bob in the wake of idleness. Even lethargy seems like a destination at this point.

I wonder sometimes how I manage. Fortune (that wicked mistress of the worthless) keeps the torch in the lighthouse burning, and I keep Her close for She is my only ally against the barren horizon, which threatens to suffocate me with its immensity. The clouds hover with hands above my throat. Grab me, you devils.

They won’t. The bastards wouldn’t dare fuck with Fortune’s darling. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Lady Luck was a bitch to begin with. So they cry instead and the sky falls down on the quarterdeck; a cockroach dinner is interrupted as a deluge sweeps through the crags of the planks, driving the father through the threshold and into the sea. The lucky bastard will probably float on his back until his feelers caress the corroded sand of Catalina. Or he will sink like a brick. I couldn’t tell you, I have never watched a roach in water.

The waling winds coalesce with the weeping thunderhead, begetting the squall, and the tempest impregnates the sea. A growth amasses at the base of the nubilous sky, a faint glimmer at first, then an ominous distension of the sea.

Those assholes have teamed up. Do they not understand the repercussions of such an assault?

But the horizon continues to grow above the mast, while my tugs at the helm prove a futile gesture. A flash fills the air and the sky lets out a thunderous laugh at my silly obstinacy.

You fools, I am the protectorate.

But before the thought finishes, a potent fog engulfs the lighthouse of Fortune, and as quickly as it took God to create light, these devils take it away.