Doesn’t every family have a crazy person in the attic?

Okay, my family doesn’t have an attic. And the word crazy gets tossed around much too easily.

Still, family has its challenges, and certainly every family member might should be locked in an attic for a while from time to time. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Sometimes I suspect I’m the one who should be in the attic…it’s probably quiet up there.

So, a particular someone in my family has a debilitating disease. This person doesn’t know I have a blog–and probably doesn’t even know what a blog is–but in the off chance I’m wrong about that, this story will be as convoluted as possible.

I’m not supposed to know this person is sick. Every time I talk to this person, I must act as if everything is fine. I know about the illness because someone else felt that I had a right to know, but that someone made me promise not to reveal that I know the truth.

In some ways, this makes life easy. I don’t have to figure out what to say or wonder what I should do to help. But then that someone tells me this person has stopped taking their medication. Just stopped. But I don’t know that, of course, so I can’t say, “Take your medicine!”

I ask, “How are you doing?”

This person says, “I’m fine. I had a cold.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I went to the doctor. Everything’s good!”

Do you ever have fake conversations with your family?

Inundated, overwhelmed, and out of my mind. You?

My son's "Are you crazy?!" look.

I’ve got a stack of novels and short stories I’ve written and a folder stuffed with rejections. I think I fumbled (to put it politely) my last effort at getting an agent. But self-publishing doesn’t appeal to me either.

You know those hoarding shows where you can see people surrounded, no, overwhelmed by the dross and remains of their lives? I feel like that except instead of pizza boxes and newspapers and cats, it written words and all the talismans that cling to them. I don’t even know where to begin.

Some days I think I can do anything I put my to. Other days…I wonder much I could carry to the dumpster before my mind clears.

Ever think of just throwing all those words away?

The Most Expensive Dog Toothpaste Ever

Sadie ripped Porter’s ear with her teeth. Earlier, my son reached for something to shove under the bathroom door as a joke, and he knocked the doggie toothpaste to the floor. He didn’t notice it.

Porter and Sadie

Sadie loves dog toothpaste. You can’t actually brush her teeth because she struggles too much to eat the paste.

I was washing dishes when Sadie found the toothpaste on the floor. She was chewing away on the tube when Porter came over to investigate. The attack ensued.

My son screamed and the dogs tried to kill each other.

I dumped a pot of soapy water on them. They separated, but one of them lunged again. I grabbed the dogs’ water bowls and threw them. Water soaked the dogs, the sofa, the carpet, and the shelves. Everyone was breathing hard.

Blood from Porter’s ear spotted a cabinet door.

At the edge of the splash zone were our two laptops. A few drops of water streaked the tops of them, but they were closed, and I thought–no harm done there.

I took care of the dogs, my son, and the dishes. I sat down with my laptop and used it a while. When the power got down to below 40%, I decided to charge it.

It wouldn’t charge. After trying various things, I had to take the MacBook in to be repaired, pay more money than I had to spare, and live for days, DAYS, without my Mac.

Years of my life were happy without computers and the Internet in them. Well, such is life today. Some people lived happy lives before TV and independence from England. You can’t go back.

So now that I have my portal into cyberspace back, what do I do? I’m feeling more and more pressure to go ahead and opt for the e-publishing path…

But I can barely get people who know me to read my work…

My laptop holds most all of my writing. Most of them are backed up one way or another, but if I’d lost the Mac, I’d have lost a lot. But it made me wonder what I’d do without all my stories. What would you do if you lost everything you’d written?