'Law & Order' spoiled me.

Work slows, and you try to look busy. I’m in a ‘hurry-up-n-wait’ moment. “Hurry up and wait,” a judge in Pascagoula once told a room full of potential jurors. I was one of them. Anyone needing to justify getting out of jury-duty approached the bench; small business-owners, work-from-home-moms, their toddlers as their props, dressed in their most adorable Baby Gap. The cuter they were, the better their chances Mommy would get to stay home, on the phone, staring at the computer-screen, talking important words to another adult, reassuring words of business-promises kept.

I have no toddler. I’m indifferent to toddlers. I don’t really care about jury-duty either. I get yanked for jury-duty. $25.00 a day. I listen to lawyers present their case. But they’re not interesting. T.V. lawyers are interesting. Real lawyers aren’t. They talk to the jury box like they’re dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. They ask questions, judging if they want you deciding their client’s fate. ‘Am I invested in seeing their client found guilty/innocent, responsible/not responsible, dangerous/not dangerous’, etc.

The endless voir dire session starts to make me slump in my seat. Fatigued, bored, eye-lids start getting heavy. And the attorney’s only on the third potential juror. I wish the judge would allow me to read a book until the lawyer gets to me. I’m not invested in listening to a potential juror tell the lawyer if he was satisfied with a car insurance company’s outcome about a fender-bender that segued into back problems, hospital visits, loss of employment. The surly-faced, elderly woman in the wheelchair at the plaintiff lawyer’s table is quiet, sitting next to her husband, and listening to the defendant’s lawyer drone on and on.

Two days later I call the 228 number to find out I’ll no longer be needed as a juror; the case of the fender-bender settled to the plaintiff.

This wasn’t worth $25.00 a day.

Opening that vein.

Write. Write free-write. Ideas come. Eventually. Even stories that halt and get stuck. Like elevators. And stories about elevators. You get stuck. Get unstuck, or you’ll be stuck writing in the back of a steno-pad about how stuck you feel about your writing. Write to breathe. Write about anything. Breathe. Write. Itch your brain, even if it doesn’t make sense in the moment. There’s no joy unless you feel the pen in your hand and watch the ink flow onto paper as you breathe writing. Writing is life. You want to live. 
Coffee! I smell coffee. What a glorious scent. Even when you don’t want to consume it, at that moment. Because you’ll need to sleep, eventually. Don't get distracted. Work, write, coffee, sleep, type, write, think. Breathe! Write. This makes no sense, and yet you don’t care. You must write the way you must breathe.