Spare Parts and Puzzles

I'm bogged down and I hate the feeling.

I've been working on the same stretch of the literary highway for days and days and days and still, those orange cones won't go away.

I suspect it's because I've boxed myself into a corner and refuse to accept it.

I know more than one person who approaches huge 1001-piece puzzles -- the ones that are all white...the ones with those infernal autumn landscapes... with fearless, positively immoral, disregard for fair play. They go along and spend hours sorting and fitting the right bits into the right places until they have completed a huge swath of the picture. BUT--when the going really gets rough and they're stumped, they have no compunction about forcing the wrong piece into the wrong slot.

And then there's the stereotypical male who decides to assemble something for the home, sans instructions. (Sometimes I think this is perhaps why all the bridges in Montreal are falling down, but, I digress.) Anyhow, this mythic creature of the male gender, happily or unhappily, fritters away a Sunday afternoon, trying to re-create the thingum, or the whats-its from Ikea with a zillion rubber washers and wing nuts and a badly finished mini tool that came with the product.

Of course, in the end, he ends up with a two-ton refrigerator which hums suspiciously, and a handful of mysterious parts which he is unable to install. So, he simply flings them away, fills out the proof of purchase for his guarantee, mails it, and Bob's your uncle. He tells you those parts were simply "extras."

I wish, I wish, I wish, I could be like that. But, no matter how hard I force a square peg into a round hole, I end up with lousy work and it doesn't ring true.

Thank God, this is only about a few paragraphs. Thank God for computers and not typewriters. I hate to think just how many sheets of paper I'd have gone through by now. On the other hand, it would probably feel really good to ball up a wad of crap and hurl it into the void. Oh, well, them's the breaks, as they say...and speaking of brakes (good segue, huh?), it's back to that highway I go.