John Travolta as a Gigantic Meteor from Outer Space

The long weekend is over, and I have been restored to myself, sort of.

Someone, somewhere, vomited.

I thought I might start the day by working on a short story.

A year ago, or so, I wrote out two short stories, longhand, and hung them on my refrigerator. I don’t know how many days it took to write them; I recall hardly anything about them.

I know that one of them started as a story about a classy couple who are in an open marriage. They travel to visit family, in one of their hometowns, where they’re confronted with their small-town counterparts, a swinging local married couple who make them sick.

That’s what the story was meant to be about, but I think it turned out differently.

Maybe it didn’t, I don’t know.

I don’t have anything against open marriages. People who can manage those are doing a great job, I imagine. Great work, everybody.

When I wrote the story, I was experimenting a little, I guess, with the writing process. I thought I would see what happened if I did the thing a lot of writers say they do, and write something then put it away for a long time without looking at it.

Most writers, when they say they’ll do that, mean they’ll do it when the story is finished, or almost finished—because if they leave that polished thing for a while and come back, they might see all kinds of problems with it they couldn’t see when they kept staring at it all the time.

I wanted to try doing that at the beginning of the process, after I wrote a rough first draft. Like, what if I didn’t know what was going on at all?

Then I got wrapped up with work and other writing projects. I left these two stories hanging on the fridge for a really long time. And I have no idea, now, what’s in them.

I’m going to have to type them out, and transcribe them onto my computer. It’ll be like reading a thing someone else wrote for the first time, rather than something I wrote.

It’s going to be SO WEIRD.

I feel like I’m a character in a mid-nineties John Travolta vehicle, who thinks his life couldn’t possibly be more exciting. He’s utterly convinced of it, in fact—and then Travolta enters the scene.

And he’s playing a gigantic meteor from outer space!