It all is so big; the emptiness, I mean. Only the width of my monitor, hardly large enough to scare a fly, but huge enough to scare the living shit out of me. That first word (appearing as two small letters in the vastness, a capital I and a lowercase t standing together in the upper-left like oddly-shaped toes testing the temperature of a creek before that first chilling dive) drove home the wooden spike needed to kill the writing block vampire.


And it worked.


Then, after It, came all, and the emptiness stepped back a notch. It didn’t retreat without prejudice, mind you, it stepped back loud and proud. It made noise. It did not fight nor did it argue the facts, it simply became aware there were others, that the others meant no (or very little) harm, and that they were encroaching and goddammit to hell no fucking little fucking letters were going the spoil the fucking party. Fuck that. Fuck that with everybody’s fucking dick, god dammit. Aint no alphabet wrote yet can smear the god of blank, the prince of nothing, the entity of empty. Aint no if, ands, or buts about it, the void was the house and the house always wins.


So, as I was saying, I typed it and all, stopped—not a conscious decision, I was spat upon and went into ‘rearing my head’ mode, so to speak—and decided to fight the white.


Which I did, hasteningly, some would say.


Later, between the too-sweet second bottle of wine and the third poorly-rolled joint, a referee was assigned to the case, and he was a real Charlie Chan rule following boy scout acting you-need-a-haircut announcing bald fatboy, and he stunk. I’m not sure, but he smelled like he’d just ate a rotted camel’s ass inside an over-ripe garden variety watermelon while wearing one of Jeffrey Dalhmer’s appetizers as rouge and a cunt rag as lipstick and a big unibrow.


And this was the punk-ass white boy in charge of Emptiness? He wasn’t even a boy yet, let alone a soldier of unfortunate—he couldn’t defend the Great Wall of China against a damn retarded mouse, for God’s sake. He, in his infinite wisdom and clarity of vision could not stop me from hitting the next key.


So I did.


It was the semicolon button, and it was good.


The White scrambled back, tripping over evil litter it’d left earlier (a McScrunchie burger wrapper and a cocaine straw with a side handle on the bottom), and almost, but not quite, gave into the “more accepted” way. Which, in this case, would involve supernatural actions, wildly overstated hand gestures, and a wig.


Lest I digest (the title of an unknown Shakespearean play about the birth of Subway and its subsequent diets, had you been listening), I wrote more, and more, and then, in a moment of unanticipated glory, found, deep in my heart, the strength to do battle. And of course I’m still going on about the white blank emptiness and me: two foes locked in battle on a cold winter night in April’a ’08, blood about to stain the arena, reusable film about to be reused and later shown on the ten o’clock news, people waiting standing shivering and sweating undecidedly not making decisions, all boiling down to one thing.


Will he type or will he not type. That, my friends, neighbors, and apparitions, is the question.
I guess we’ll never find out

The end