Wild Island Words

            Sometimes the words seem to inhabit a terrible island, where there is no place to make landfall. I can hear the words from my ship, beating their native islander drums through the thick jungle as I circle the island trying to find a place to come ashore and set my word traps and capture some really excellent words.

            Those words dance around a giant bonfire for hours, gyrating and whooping, and cavorting like wild beasts. They are tricky to capture in a big group so you have to be selective. The leader is a great chieftain named Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis and he is a wise chief. He’s been chief for a very long time, mostly because even if you do capture him you really don’t have much use for him. (Seriously, it’s a real word).  So you just end up throwing him back in with the other restless natives.

            The tribes are numerous and I’m often amazed they can congregate on such a small island without sinking it under their weight. They are terrible, crafty and elusive. Eventually I’ll find a place to tie up my landing craft and wade ashore with my traps and gear and those words will come to me like I’m coated in a delicious word honey. Until then however, I’m just floundering at sea with a head full of nothing to write.

            The words led me down a few paths this morning. There was the story of the two robbers trying to break into an apartment building but were having existential debates about the validity of their chosen profession as they were climbing in through the window. The words fled back to the island about a paragraph into that story so I had to go on this word island safari.

            A few straggling words didn’t take off to the island with the rest. They’ve been with me a lot lately and figured they might as well stick around. Love, loss, depression, loneliness, beautiful, sex, and strangely the word “creepy” stuck around to see where they would wind up. I think they are beginning to develop a taste for the finer civilized life they do not have on their savage island home.  I can’t say that these words are all that helpful while trying to write something about something something.

            Looks like a few more words have abandoned me for life on the island. Here I am still trying to set my traps and bring down a few choice sentences and paragraphs and appropriate descriptives to articulate some crazy story about, maybe, a lady having a conversation with her cat, which has been dead for ten years.

            I’ve made my way ashore now and I’m setting my traps and in three days I should have some excellent choice words to hurl and these pages. They’ll stick like a scab over a wound that just won’t heal right, eventually becoming a scar, eventually a reminder of some deed that didn’t work out the way you planned. Something something words, mumbling.