It happens to me once or twice every time around this time of year: I really can芒鈧劉t think of anything to write about.
Actually, to be more truthful, I just don芒鈧劉t feel like writing about anything.
Heck, I can be even more truthful than that: I don芒鈧劉t really feel like doing anything at all.
Actually, that芒鈧劉s not true, either.
There is something that I芒鈧劉d love to be doing right now.
There芒鈧劉s blue sky outside of my office window.
And there are just enough billowy white clouds floating around the edges, towards Vancouver, to make me wish I could lie out in the backyard in one of those 芒鈧搝ero gravity芒鈧 chairs that Donna and I bought a few years back, and count them.
There芒鈧劉s one out there, hanging somewhat off to the northwest, that kinda looks like a giant freshly hatched chick, with a (relatively) tiny, crooked featherless wing sticking up and out of one side and a much-too-big-for-its-size head flopping forward because it芒鈧劉s still simply too heavy to lift after the horribly tiring struggle of breaking through its shell to the freedom of the outside world.
Oh, wait!
The head has now floated away from the body and has become a turkey with its butt stuck high in the air, while the chick芒鈧劉s body has morphed into a dancing rooster, reminiscent of Foghorn Leghorn.
The two are facing each other, and I swear I can actually hear Foghorn instructing the turkey: 芒鈧揘ow, boy! I say, boy! Boy, I say! I say! I say, boy, ya gotta hear what I芒鈧劉m sayin芒鈧劉, boy芒鈧 listen to me, boy芒鈧γ⑩偓聺
And I look again, and they芒鈧劉ve both evaporated into just a few still-diminishing wisps.
Meanwhile, further to the south, a giant anvil has magically transformed itself into the starship Enterprise, complete with two albeit off-kilter nacelles and a command module, tilted towards the heavens to begin a new journey to explore the vast reaches of space and to 芒鈧揵oldly go where no man has gone before.芒鈧
(This cloud has taken on the shape most like the original series Enterprise, before Star Trek Next Generation ventured instead to where 芒鈧搉o one芒鈧 has gone before.)
Or perhaps it is armed with the Genesis Device, in hopes of restoring Spock 芒鈧 whose alter ego Leonard Nemoy left us a few days ago for an exploration that every one of us will eventually undertake芒鈧 because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.
Now, of course, parts of the Enterprise have faded, its nacelles trimmed and its lower decks shifted into fins, leaving the craft looking more like Flash Gordon芒鈧劉s rocket, headed off to the planet Mongo to do battle with Ming the Merciless.
And there芒鈧劉s a killer whale rising out of the horizon about where the chick/turkey/Foghorn Leghorn faded into oblivion just a few moments ago.
No, wait!
It芒鈧劉s a submarine 芒鈧 one of those short, fat ones that are usually called 芒鈧搒ubmersibles芒鈧 and are used by modern-day explorers with daring to equal their brains, to descend to the deepest depths of the ocean, to the Marianas Trench or the North Atlantic Rift or the thermal vents off Vancouver Island, where dwell strange creatures and even stranger geological anomalies.
In the time it took me to write that, it has become a shark 芒鈧 definitely a shark. Perhaps a great white, but I think more like a whale shark: huge but harmless.
Lucky for me, blue skies, white clouds, and a warm March day are just enough to overcome a limited desire to write.