Dishes, roaches, and M. Night

Washing dishes sucks.

The last thing I want to do is spend time scraping and scrubbing under the faucet.

But it has to be done, or the roaches could swarm the kitchen.

Soldiers rushing across an ivory lawn, they are, coordinating a candlelit siege from afar. The few, brave frontrunners know I will show them no mercy, and will crush their advance swiftly, smashing their carapace hide into the mesa overlooking the sink, with the bottom of my fist. Yet onward they press. Sheer volume may turn the tide and success will prove that I may run and hide, fearing their near bulletproof vests.

I must show no mercy, or they may sense my irrational fear and overtake me instead.

Not with anger or vengeance seated in my heart, I simply despise these scrambling oval-shaped villains for they remind me that laziness is rewarded with finger-width insects lured by the scent of leftovers.

There I was, running plates under hot water, plunging a green and yellow rectangle into dish soap, when my girlfriend walks into the kitchen.

I suddenly hear the odd and chilly score of a familiar M. Night film. I wasn't sure, but could it be?

"Is that The Village," I ask.

"Yes," she says.

Inspiration, my many artist friends say comes and goes.

One friend among them says writers are like MMA fighters. They train constantly. They train for the fight; they train for the discipline; they train because at any given moment they can lose their focus. If you lose your focus as a writer, my friend goes on to explain, you can lose a lot of ground in the meantime. So writers have to train for the between time, when they're not writing, to make the time they have time to write, count.

Powerful stuff, if you listen closely.

So I listened. And tonight, following last night's M. Night flick, I cranked out 1,000 words in less than an hour.

Never have my hands scaled that wall before. As I sat there, gazing at the backlit screen of my iMac, a sense of accomplishment washed over me. A confidence I had known reassessed itself, and found a new tier of fulfillment.

So, to you, Oh blog follower, whenever you have the urge to create, to produce, to continue a project, heed his words: Train, for rain or for shine.