Longer than the Great Wall, the Parks and Recreation Commission meeting crept through its agenda while I napped, woke, napped, woke, and members had barely reached the end of a sentence.

Arriving home I wade through dogs, drop my camera bag, and fall on the couch near Jerry. A commercial melts the surface of my eyes into a glassy pool and wipes expression from my face. I realize seconds later that I hate TV. I hate TV I hate it. I hate that all modern American living rooms are arranged around the TV. TV, where all the couches and chairs are aimed right at it. Screw you TV.

Anyway, I glance back at the commercial as stupid words chirp from someone's mouth: If you experience bleeding, loss of vision or lightheadedness …

I yell, It's stupid, It's an unnatural, medicated screwing. Don't take it!!!

I stuff my middle finger extra close to the actress on TV. Static charge tickles my skin.

Jerry says, it's TV, who cares what they say.

Yup.

I drop downstairs and sit at my computer, thinking of things that I hate. After a few long days I am worn out, a little tired after tonight's meeting, which lasted longer than death, and I am cranky from the lousy TV.

I think of slick entrails slipping through my fingers. Warm, copper scented guts. I take this to mean that I want to kill my TV. Truthfully, I do.

I looked up the word disembowel, just so I could sing along: deprive of entrails.

Shall I say to the chicken the cow the fowl the pig, I am sorry …and as I wind their lower intestines around my fork like spaghetti, I'll add, so , sorry, but you have been bad today, and you can't have these again until tomorrow, when you apologize for that commercial….

You may think I sound nuts, but that meeting was really long.

Lots of aggression lately and I have no real place to toss it. Doubts, like little worms, slurp my thoughts up.

OK. Maybe a glass of wine and my book will help. Today the writing is like etching sins into my skin.

Sometimes writing is like swallowing buckets of sooty coal and spitting out itty bitty specks that glint in the sun. No diamonds here.

Soon I'll need to crawl carefully inside my head, searching patterns in the dust for clues. I think my subconscious tip toes around up here and jumbles the wires to confuse me. I still have a smell that connects me to a memory. I reach, and it's gone.

In my head today is a speck of time at the bar last night. Less than a minute. A customer sits and orders a Corona. Pushing a slice of lime into the bottleneck I hand him a beer. Watching me, then glancing over my shoulder he asks, what do you do if there is a fight around here?

Turning to see what he sees, I pick out The Angry Guys. I move. As I reach the group of maybe six or seven people -- a few guys with their girlfriends -- one guy pushes another. The little tableau of strained faces and postures at odd angles seems to shimmer, poised for the next move.

Stepping toward the man staggering back from the push, I hold out a stiff hand at him and anticipating a return swing, I say, don't.

To grim stares I turn to look at the other guys. To them I say again, Don't. Done.

Walking back to the guy sipping his Corona, I answer, I don't know what I would do if there was a fight in here. Let them exhaust themselves, I guess, then shove them out the door.

He tells me, they are friends, you know.

Hmmm.

Later I mopped over the spot where they stood, swiping any angry impressions away.

I dedicate the following entry to my friend Erin, who deserves it. She is a creative girl with shoes to match each experience. Hers are shoes few others could fill.

Drop all your words on a page Erin, and rearrange them later.

______________________

Advice from a writing website: start a blog.

Yup. All started...

Use it to talk about your own writing process, to share your ideas and experiences, or to publish your work to a live audience.

I am not interested in my own writing process, but I will share it. I am random. It's not method, but purpose. I had soaked up so much Lily that I needed to wring it out and purge. The blog is my sturdy receptacle.

Ideas and experiences all shine inside the glass walls of my blog. Yup. Everything is visible. I needed a place to put the thoughts and feelings I was having about Lily. The blog's first sentences popped into my head and from that moment, GoodGirlLily began.

The website for writers stated, you are a writer so own up and say it out loud: “I am a writer.”

I say aloud: I am NOT a dork who will chant and cheer for myself.

Own up? Writing is not a drug habit. Maybe it's an affliction, like some obvious itchy rash you can't clear up, but do I really need to own up?

I know the author was aiming to encourage new or timid and uncertain writers who pour crap on the page, then swirl it around with their fingertips.

The next piece of advice is OK. The website instructs the reader to, let go of your inner editor. When you sit down to write a draft, refrain from proofreading until that draft is complete.

My inner editor has my mom's angry voice: that sentence is RUN-ON! Your verb is WEAK and PASSIVE.

My own voice joins this one, reminding me that I hate using THE thousands of times like a railroad tie just to get through a sentence. So I am always reworking things to most concisely express a thought. While THE is unavoidable, I hate using THE like a staircase when a good, strong jump will do.

For anyone wondering why I upended the bucket and dropped commas quotation marks and formal punctuation -- this is a blog, so I am letting my hair down.

The website says that when you sit down to write a draft, refrain from proofreading until that draft is done. OK. Get your thoughts out uninterrupted, then reshape the soppy clay. OK.

Proofreading does not mean grammar and spelling corrections alone. Can I make the thoughts clearer or the phrase better? Is it boring? And I often find a lead or pick up an image while I am clunking around doing laundry and my mind is essentially off. There I stand poised with a cap spilling dark blue laundry soap and I remember Lily with her head draped over the seat as if she were a wet towel as limp as seaweed, looking back at sickness sprinting on nimble bare feet to catch her.

Well it missed. Shithead. You missed. Almost got us though.

I remember a college student interviewing me and asking about writing. Did I follow The Pyramid plan as I built a story? Did I answer who what when why where or how.

I told her, nope.

I am not giving myself credit for a creative approach with which I succeeded. Nothing like that.

A formal news writing course or journalism training never saw me in their classroom. I struggled to write when I convinced a crazy editor to hire me as a reporter. There I sat as a typesetter (who cannot type, by the way. I look at my hands) and wondered how I could become a newspaper writer. It was just a goal without any other thought. I just warned to see if I could do it.

After Crazy Editor had interviewed a few people, she finally called me in.

We talked and admired the nice weather from inside our nice climate controlled building and noted the nice town and nice groups living there when she finally asked, Kendra, do you think you can do this job? Wide-eyed I imagined that she should already have her answer, or I would have never warranted an interview.

So I said, Lorraine, do YOU think I can do this job?

Almost fell off the boat and sunk. But I am here now, writing about Lily who had me blow-my-top angry today. She has got to stop lunging at passing vehicles.

I told Jerry, I was really angry with her. I took her by the fur around her shoulders and sat her down hard, I told him. How long have I been running with her? What is wrong?

The writing site begins by recommending that writers use headlines from magazines for inspiration.

This site I tripped over while adrift on the Internet was today's inspiration.

Erin's post is Lily, numer one hundred thirty five.

On the brink of a huge emotional blow-out I dream of a baby.

Unfamiliar surroundings. Corridors and rooms and a landscape and stairs are before me and I move through them perfectly until I find the baby. With Baby's head in my palm and squirming arms and legs moving, I hold Baby close to my body and step through the maze of strange space flawlessly again.

I remember details of a pink baby, soft and the slightest weight. metallic surfaces, grays, and a fire pit filled with orange.

Today I come home from work half asleep and resentful that I have to drag myself out again for a meeting when the dogs and dinner and laundry and work around the house are screaming for me to finish. So I look down where Jerry has the ladder planted and flip because it's crushing my plants. I am pissed all over again for every argument we have ever had about plants.

He has decided I do not appreciate the hard work and labor he has put into improving our house. I think Jerry is insane to stay with me.

It's not the plants or the ladder. It's me. Tomorrow I'll pull the covers back and gently nudge self loathing and doubt. They're late for dinner as I am being swallowed by my moods, and so is Jerry.

I don't get it.

I imagine a large eraser rubbing back and forth and seconds later I lack enough substance to stay awake. I nod off on the back of Jerry's motorcycle.

We have to get me some coffee, I said a bit later.

How was your nap, Jerry asks.

After closing the bar and getting to bed after 3 am I was back up and in town for the Labor Day Parade that swirled its flags and banged its drums along the main streets. I was up and down and across and back again with the camera. As I had described, community pride swells on Labor Day, unlike any other time or event, pushing people from their homes toward the street. Toes slipping off the curb, residents glanced uphill anticipating the first sight or sound that the procession would soon pass by their eager faces and leave in its wake a path strewn with candy, confetti, and horse droppings. Year after year the town's groups both public and private roll, march, or skip past in celebration.

Kneeling beside a float where children's heads peek down at me, decorative flags clutched in their fists, I swipe bubbles from my view and ask for their names. From behind me a man shouts: you dropped your notebook! He called out just as I felt it slip from my waist band where I wedge the flip pad. It's easy to reach and easy to stash right there at the small of my back. Got it! I swiped the fluttering thing off the pavement.

More than two-and-a-half hours later I was near the grand stand as the last tractor rolled by and a line of traffic, which marked the exact place where the regular world pushed to resume, followed a police car. Waiting there for Jerry to find me on his motorcycle, I watched as volunteers promptly cleared the potted mums, stacks of hay, and makeshift stage assembled on the back of a flatbed truck. Someone released a cluster of balloons that would rise until it burst. Bye bye balloons.

Soon I am back on the bike where I nod off.

The dogs only got a brief time in the woods today chasing tennis balls.

Ugh.

Once for every blade of grass, he barked. For every stone in the driveway and every cloud. For every raindrop or breath or petal in bloom, he barked. Thanks Ozzie.

Across the street was a lawnmower and a more distant grinding sound. Debris fed into a chipper? What a ridiculously loud morning.

Later I run with the dogs until I hear nothing other than wind and a forest floor crunching underfoot.

I catch pieces of The Stand on TV and Jerry announces: Thank God it's over. I can't do another 30 seconds of Stephen King.

You like this stuff that makes no sense, he asks.

Yup, I answer.

We hear Lily's growly bark spread through the woods and echo off trees standing with indifference to wildlife clambering up and down its trunk, nesting in its branches, and the cold and the heat and Lily's voice slipping past knots and limbs.

That's your dog barking, Jerry said.

Dogs and doggy things are strewn throughout the house. Can't stride with confidence or urgency without jamming a toe against an aluminum food dish that slaps like a cymbal across hardwood and into the rocking chair.

My mood is a perfectly symmetrical, matching set of cement shoes….

I absorb my moods through my surroundings.

Wishing Jerry was not holding his hands up in front of his eyes I tried to explain: you bring your moods with you, right?

Hmmm.

OK. I sometimes soak my moods up from my surroundings, I told him. Here is an example that would be hilarious if it were not about me. We were out at a big bar/restaurant and I needed to use the ladies room. But the floor was too slippery. I couldn't walk on that floor. Someone would have to help me. Maybe a waitress or the bartender? I would never make it, step by frightened step all the way across that slick surface.

Embarrassed, but immobilized, I told Jerry, I can't walk across the floor. I'll slip.

He was wide-eyed.

Grabbing a waitress I confessed, I am afraid I'll slip on the floor, could you walk with me….

Sounds like I take pills and the room tips, doesn't it? Nope. Sounds like I am stoned and imagining things, right? Like a boyfriend I had in college who decided that some acid would be nice. He told me that he thought he saw a small question mark crawl out into the room and grow bigger and bigger.

The slick floor was the prompt of a really corrosive mood and my mind sort of gave up. My surroundings swallowed me. Really.

I can't get on Interstate 95 if my mood woke up with the strength of Balsa wood, rather than oak. Some days I can't talk to people. Well, I can. I can even sound normal, but overwhelmingly I do not want to reach inside and drag out my voice. I do so with protest. Then, just to salt this thick stupid oozing wound are the little devils inside me jabbing at one another with really pointy little swords. I am upset with myself for being such a drag for Jerry. It's not high maintenance. It's undertow. It's not like I can just stop making demands already. I am just overwhelmed and not functioning. Funny thing though … I can pull myself through it without witnesses. Somehow when this horrible mood, which I try to envision as some separate thing from myself -- a paisley business suit with bright yellow stripes and fake leopard waist-band -- grips me, it thrives on attention. I give it tons of fuel by worrying what Jerry must be going through from the outside looking in. He fuels it be being miffed. Takes him quite a long time to finally realize he does not have a tool to tighten whatever is loose in my head, but he is human. He is patient, but he is human, and I am possessed.

If I brush up against poor lighting I become irritable. Too much noise wraps around me and I buckle. If my gaze collides with places I do not like, I am doomed. Do not take me for a ride along Pershing Drive in Ansonia with its cheep, plastic, fluorescent discount stores filled with hopeless people soothing boredom with bargain shopping and by habit and rote filling their lives with crap.

It makes me sad and desperate to see Big Mega Huge Discount Club looming across a city block surrounded by blacktop for miles, and people just shuffling in, shuffling out.

So there we are tonight seated under lighting that bugs me. Jerry, My Friend Gerald. He proposes to stab himself with a fork, perhaps? Glaring up at a low-hanging light, I know he is assessing the cord. Will it support his weight if he wraps it around his neck? My neck? All because the bar was full and they sent us with our drinks to the vast emptiness of a dining room illuminated by bulbs casting a pall across the space. Skin shone with a drained and boodles color. Ick Ick Ick. And my mood is gone. Stephanie comes over with her hair bobbing and takes our drink orders. Ick. Her brow splashes shade across eyes pushed deep in her face above cheekbones glowing with this life-sucking light.

Oh, what a bad night. The seats were wrong and the lighting was like a dishrag and I just did not have the capacity to twist my expression into Normal Face. This was close to my shut-down mode, but not all the way there where I hear and see, but my eyes are frozen to a spot on the ground and I just hunch over. Jerry drove my inert unblinking body all the way to Maine while I was like this. The long car ride on ugly highway the whole way just smothered me.

Sometimes I write as if I have been holding my breath, and other times I stare at my fingers limp on the keys waiting for the words to come. Enough with the dramatic moods. Where is Lily, who whips through the woods with feet made of springs?