Like a Bug on a Windshield

Where have I been lately? I'm glad I asked. It's been so long that I've forgotten what I've shared and what I haven't, but this is my second month of unemployment and I still don't like it. I swear I had more free time when I was working. I spend at least thirty hours a week online looking for jobs (in case you've been gainfully employed for the past decade or so, all job hunting is now done on the internet). The few times I've ventured out asking for applications, they told me to go home and apply at their websites. Applying for a job online takes about three hours, including the personality profile. After spending all that time filling in little boxes, you get a message that says "thank you for revealing all your personal information, now click here to fill out the application for the company you thought you were applying to." Another three hours of filling in boxes and answering psychologically tricky questions and you get a message that

I can't believe it's already that time of year when I go off on my rant about the television industry and all the great shows that have been cancelled. As I think I've pointed out before, it's kind of silly for the networks to refer to this as the end of the "season," when there are so many interruptions during what was supposed to be a continuous thirteen weeks. The networks show a couple of episodes, then take a couple of weeks off because it's near the end of the football season and they don't want their ratings affected by the loss of a few people in cheese hats. Then they show an episode or two and it's the beginning of the college basketball idiocy, so they take four weeks off. A season of primetime television looks a lot like really good Swiss cheese because it has so many holes in it. In the past year alone, my ten hours a week of television viewing has required that I start recording and watching half a dozen new shows and/or shows I never

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. Then again, maybe not. Spring started out pleasant enough: I found myself unemployed against my will for the first time in more than 40 years in the work force; much of my neighborhood was terribly damaged in a tornado; and the weeds have overtaken my garden as never before. The hellish part is my novel. It seems that when the creative juices flow and the novel is practically writing itself, every little detail of life gets in the way and prevents me from actually writing. When I have time to sit down and write, I struggle to find the right words, I write whole chapters that don't fit with the plot and have to be scrapped or my characters simply sit around chatting to no particular end. This may not sound like hell, but being that writer, in that moment, it begins to seem like The Twilight Zone. Perhaps you'd have to be there. At the moment, I do have time to write, so I'd better get back to it before my phone begins to buzz wit