Today, anyway,

this blog is a forum for me to plonk down some text, I guess, but really, it's just a place for me to say hi to you in the comments section. That's really the best part, anyway. Who cares what's up here, yeah?

I'm trying to do some writing and I found some 37 cent stamps in an old box and they reminded me of something. So here. Don't worry, I'll revise. This is what it is, and it's just a bit of nothing that I guess I'll work on for a bit to find out it it's even a story. For now, it's called

Shhhhhh

"I want you to tell me what you think about doubts," Donald said.

Donald was my fiancee. He had this watered-down smile smeared across his face, chewing his mouthful of broccoli. His fork dropped to the carpet — his fingertips had gone numb from electrical shocks — and I laughed, meanly, because I hated him just then.

"I think this is the same old conversation, over and over and over again," I told him. "I think it's not only boring, but unoriginal from the start. I think you should make up your own mind, because I'm not going to give you a free pass on this one."

Maybe I should have stuck a lit stick of dynamite up his ass — I'd printed up the wedding invitations, bought these special stamps depicting a white magnolia, really went all out — but in lieu, I left him there with his overcooked ostrich burger and his dirty fork and I shut myself into the back room, the one I hardly used, though it was the only place in our house I could be alone and gather my thoughts and (supposedly) create stuff.

The door didn't lock, so I shoved some heavy shit in front of it, by which I mean two one-gallon buckets of ceramic tile adhesive. We'd been remodeling the bathroom for a couple of years.

We were slow remodelers: Donald, because he's riddled with doubt, and me because I was really fucking caught up in a lot of cooking and cleaning.

I'm a workaholic. I'd spent my entire post-Bachelor's life in meaningful nowhere no-pay jobs. I had carpal tunnel and a touchy lower back BEFORE I went off to graduate school, where I worked doing something that didn't ease those injuries; I still had them when I graduated and returned to the same old job. It's no wonder Donald-the-perpetual-doubter has doubts about me, specifically. And I was too fat, or that's what Donald told me. To which I said I needed some iron in my diet. Hence, the lean ostrich burgers.

Between us, it was all this great big compromise. Only I was beginning to feel like I was doing all the compromising and more, that this was the correct way because I was jobless and therefore contributing nothing. Never mind that I was also planning our lovely wedding at lovely Quail Hollow Ranch State Park, which I managed to book only because I blew the head ranger.

Just kidding--I blew nobody. I was stupidly, stupidly faithful to Donald, who would never have to worry about his weight or his cholesterol or whatever was wrong with him.

At five feet, six inches tall, I weighed 125. Donald was nine inches taller than me, and he consumed fewer calories than I did. We didn't eat out anymore because he thought he'd been poisoned by a chef. And lately, even the food I prepared smelled "funny" to him. His legs looked like knobby sticks.