An Avalanche of Thoughts vs The Pen

“Molly” what a cute name for a young, slender adult. She’s not the one I remember seeing behind the Cafe counter at the Happy Valley Barnes & Noble. I wonder if one of the girls I became familiar with, who were so afraid of losing their jobs, actually lost them?

Checking through my saved B&N Cafe receipts. Could it be I haven’t been here since November of last year?

Sans cell phone I feel both free and frightened. How will Mainio contact me other than the oh-so-20th-Century note I left wedged between his black, glob-shaped, X-box controller and the remote?

I came here to read, but yet I sit down and begin writing immediately. That’s why I sigh whenever I see the question, “Should I become a writer?” You either are or are not. Just like my other not-favorite query, “Should I become an actor?”

Mainio's's Pens

I was talking with Mainio yesterday (or rather I should say he was talking to me) about how he had changed from writing on the the laptop (a misnomer) to writing with his favorite Papermate felt tip pens. Pens that by the brown cardboard carton I used to bring home from our business for decades. And the 14″ wide, ugly green striped impact printer paper so that he could draw endlessly, like all boys do when they’re young.

I told Mainio what I thought, and that’s since hand-writing is such a laborious process, and so difficult to reproduce or replicate, that it is my preferred method since it forces me to pause and contemplate what I’m trying to say rather than go yammering on and on attempting to catch and hold an avalanche of thoughts and express them at 45+ WPM in QWERTY.

However, one challenge is capturing all the fleeting thoughts that come and then quickly evaporate. Thoughts which hammer around in my head every waking moment–the same thoughts I attempt to slow down with alcohol, but then discover again, I can’t slow down the alcohol intake, resulting in another wasted afternoon of The Rockford Files watching.

A situation which stretched out to an absence of almost 2 months from my Barnes & Noble Cafe.