Ryan, will you please hit the red button?

I want you to know this was hand written. At my kitchen table. The smell of a match still lingered when I began. It smelled like the long, pastel matches my mother used to keep on the mantle - before she bought a pre-lit Christmas tree and arranged white pillar candles in the hearth in place of fire logs. Some matches can smell entirely different from other matches. When it faded, my kitchen smelled of white pepper candles. Smell is important to a story, but often left out unless it is raining. The smell of rain... - so boring. Rain smells like worms anyway. I like that odor, but it's not rain you're smelling - it's worms and earth.

And I am not handwriting this out of necessity. My computer is in working order in the other room, most likely feeling rejected. It's just that handwriting is far better than typing. And not because it is most organic, or takes more care. Just because it frees up a hand. A hand that can be used for smoking, or pressing your warm coffee mug to your cheek. A hand that can shoo the needy little calico off your lap - or scratch her ear if you're a kinder person than that.

There have been too many things that have kept me from sleep in my life. Painting canvases, sewing dresses, gluing things, depression, anxiety, love, sex, heartbreak, heartbroken friends, feuding neighbors, mewing cats, dripping faucets, creaking floorboards, tornado warnings, scary movies, soul confessions...and, of course, Claire. But now I find myself up writing. Lists, essays, theories, blogs. Writing letters. Writing my name. Writing by hand. (I will not write fiction. I will not write poetry. I have never really enjoyed either. There are very few exceptions.) Writing until far too late. Until it is nearly time for me to put coffee on and sit on my porch and begin my day.

More than losing sleep, writing poses another problem for me. Like everything else - this will end badly. I will obsess over my writing and soon come to resent it. Because the more I write, the less enjoyable it becomes. Now it is study and soon it will become work. Like a relationship: the more you grow to love someone and know about them, the more you realize you are not equipped to care for them in the way they deserve - to sufficiently support their weight. So you try to equip yourself even when they're not asking you to. You do. And nobody's expecting you to, but you feel like you must. And you can't. I can't just enjoy the enjoyable. It becomes too serious to be fun. If I've once loved it, eventually I will run it into the ground.

And there is the problem of the ego. A writer should acknowledge certain things - understand. Know not to attempt to convince you they are telling you a new story. Every story has been told by many people at many times. Every idea once articulated. A good writer will know that they are creating new details and nothing more. Like paintings. Like songs. Like dreams. You think your dream is so new and authentic, but it isn't. It has been dreamed by countless generations. You've just changed the details - the perspective - while you sleep. If your ego won't accept this (and of course it won't) I will lend you all of my dream interpretation dictionaries.

A writer must assume. Assume that you are just like me. And that, for most of us, is hard to do - to admit. You have to assume that everyone has asked the moon for help. Stalked someone on myspace. Mulled over the frightening possibility of spontaneously combusting. There is nothing more annoying than the friend who declares that it is "just like them" to stop and smell a flower as they pass by. That's just like everyone. It's almost insulting (pretentious, really) to write as if you are the only one who appreciates the crickets chirping or lightning bugs. To assume you are the only one to take care in subtleties. You just have to assume.

My mother once explained the problem of duality to me like this: We are all a pot of boiling water. Some of us are bubbling and some of us are still but we are all just the same pot of water. (And I later came to realize that she certainly didn't come up with this metaphor herself - and that this metaphor just complicates the problem of duality really.) But duality. That's the problem of writing. How to know when to explain, how to know when to assume.

Just the same pot of water.

I like this - and hate it. I have this ongoing internal struggle to be different - to be the same. Which do I like better? Can I like them equally? I'm not really the same, but I am exactly. I love that I have synesthesia (I see printed numbers in color) but I'm comforted that I am not the only one with it because it is weird. I often find myself driving, listening to a mix CD and thinking that I must be the only person in the universe listening to that song at that moment. Immediately I realize that is impossible and feel relief - inclusion. I like being the only one on the top of the Royal Oak parking garage, sitting, thinking, sipping, smoking, looking out over the city. But I like that I know other people who have gone there for the same reason. I love that I am the only one in the world who is Claire's mother - but thank God I'm not the only mother.

I have a problem accepting that someone else also believes the lyrics to Metal Heart to be written for her. I hate that someone else feels nostalgia for her father when she smells sawdust. That other painters go through burnt umber and yellow ochre as fast as I do. I don't like that everyone's grandmother smelled like mine. I hate that sometimes all the Firewood candles are out of stock - that fig cologne is flying off the shelves. These are my things. Things that make me different - and the exact same.

The problem for a writer - when to end. How to end it. Tidy things up and make it feel purposeful. Of course, I never know how to end things. I can't even be the first to hang up.