I need an office

Okay, time to get down to the nitty gritty.

Last night the book club started with friends earlier this year met. The hostess (can one still say “hostess”, I wonder, or is everyone now a host?) has a little studio, probably six foot by eight foot, where she goes every morning to do her freelance translating work. I’d never been in there before, but last night she wanted to show off a painting she’d recently bought, so we all trouped in. “Oh, my god,” I said. “I need somewhere like this. A room dedicated to writing. Not just a desk in my bedroom.” Yes, the hostess agreed, you need a work space. A get serious space.

There is a spot on my property where such a lovely work room could be erected, but, as truly lovely as this would be, I cannot, of course, afford to do this, not even an insulated structure with no electricity.

I was disappointed a few months ago when I didn’t win the truck. (What? What? What on earth is she talking about? Fear not, it will make sense in a minute.) Every spring our local Co-op, part of a western Canada chain, has a competition that involves filling a booklet with stickers. If you get all the stickers in a given section you are eligible to win various prizes, including $100,000. The sticker book is of course rigged. You never get all the stickers for the big cash prizes. But there is a second competition you can enter on-line for separate prizes, one of which was a pickup truck. I really wanted to win that truck. Well, not the truck, but the “or $35,000 in cash”. That cash would have cleared my line of credit debt – something I will never be able to do on my own. So I entered the truck competition as often as I could. But I didn’t win. Bummer.

A few days later I bought a lottery ticket for the first time in god knows how long. I probably buy one a year on impulse and when I do I leave it on my wallet for a month (where it can represent endless possibilities) before checking it to find that once again it is “not a winner”. So, after a month or so I checked it and to my surprise the prize light lit up. I didn’t have time to register surprise, let alone excitement, before the machine revealed I had won five dollars. Five dollars? For fuck sake. I thought the lowest prize you could win was ten dollars. I am never going to get rid of the debt dumped on me.

What does the truck or lottery ticket have to do with anything? Well, aside from the obvious financial benefits, as I thought last night, a lottery win (doesn’t have to be a million or more dollars) would allow me to build that studio. A place to write and do nothing else. My imaginary studio would have a sign on the door that said: “NO stupid fucking spider solitaire within these walls on pain of electrocution.” And I would indeed figure out a way for my desk chair to emit an electric shock if I even went on the site, let alone started a game.

Yes, the bane of my existence is back. Hours and hours lost when I could be outside landscaping or reading a book on the garden swing. On Tuesday, I broke off in the middle of a marathon, determined to do something – anything – else. I decided to unpack my suitcase from my trip to Seattle. I opened the medicine cabinet to put something away. Glanced down at the sink and when I looked back up I was hallucinating. What I saw was not the contents of the medicine cabinet. It was a Spider Solitaire screen. I kid you not. I blinked, looked again and it was still there. I closed the door of the cabinet and walked out of the bathroom. And then what did I do? I went back to playing Spider Solitaire. (Happily, when I finally went back to check the medicine cabinet what I saw was the normal contents.)

I could spend some time pondering what the fuck is the matter with me, but I’ve past the one-page-a-day point and I have an appointment with my doctor. Let’s see what he has to say about this hallucination.

For the record, I will not play stupid fucking Spider Solitaire today.

À demain.