Guesses At Nothing

The ants in my backyard are vindictive sons of bitches.  I poured vinegar down their anthill and they slashed my tires.  So I hit them with homemade napalm and they stole my baby.  Hundreds of them came in and took her from her carriage.  She looked like a crowd surfer at an insect concert.  I would have stopped them but they tied me down with thousands of pieces of dental floss.  From where they got it I'll never know.  My wife found me six hours later when she got home from work.  As you can understand, she was quite mad. 
   
That night I canvased the neighborhood, checking my neighbors yards and every culvert or shrub in the area but my sweet little baby was no where to be found.  I broadened my search to the adjacent apartment complex but still no luck. I was starting to get nervous that they had devoured my sweet little plumb, so I decided to fight fire with fire and went off to get my shovel.  I dug at that damn anthill all through the night with only the light from my Coleman lantern.  Throngs of ants climbed into my clothes and hair.  They were biting my eyeballs and lips, but still I dug. I was going to get the queen and ransom her back for my baby.  
   
When I found the queen she bit my thumb when I picked her from her lair.  The pain was immense and my whole arm began to throb.
    "Give me back my baby or the queen gets it!" I yelled into the night.  Suddenly the ants stopped biting me and assembled into columns and rows like a marching army.  I followed them out of my yard, out of the neighborhood, and out of the town into the great dismal darkness.  We walked for miles into the countryside with only the light from my lantern and only the sound of the crickets and my scuffing feet.  The queen wriggled every so often, but I made sure to keep my grip.  Finally we steered off into the woods and traveled for what seemed like miles. 
   
What I saw next struck fear into my heart like the sight of a legion of ghosts. It was an anthill that towered fifty feet high crawling with creeping little ants.  On top of the anthill was my dear sweet babe, covered from head to toe in what looked like peanut butter.  I cast down my lantern which shattered and spit out flames then I scurried to the top of the hill as fast as I could while being careful not to lose the queen.  At the top I picked up my sweet babe who was indeed covered in peanut butter. I started to descend and behind me I heard a frightful noise like the sound of ice cracking on a cold dark lake.  I glanced over my shoulder and saw an ant the size of a hound dog rise from the hill.  The reflection of the flames danced in its eyes.  Its enormous mandibles cracked open and close as it began to give chase. I crushed the queen beneath my fingers and the enraged devil ant screeched like a banshee. Below me, flames still crackled from my lantern.  I slid the rest of the way down the hill and secured my child in the crook of a tree then picked up the biggest stick I could find. 
   
The ant never stood a chance.  I beat him about the head, thorax, and abdomen with such force that his exoskeleton split in two revealing his icky, gooey ant guts.  My child and I headed back to the road then quietly on to home.  Through the whole thing, she never cried a tear. I never did figure out why she was covered in peanut butter.  Unsurprisingly, my wife is still mad.

My wiener, I mean whiner little sister is complaining that I don't update this site enough, so I thought I would throw this one out there. It's a question I have been thinking about for months now. What exactly does it mean to be a writer? There are two prominent definitions on Princeton's wordnet:

a) a person who writes (books or stories or articles or the like) professionally (for pay)

and

b) a person who is able to write and has written something

I fall strictly in the B category as I have never been paid a single dime for anything I have ever written. I have never really tried either. I tend to think the b category is the more noble one anyway. The b category is all inclusive; anyone can join. All you need is a pen and pad, keyboard and screen, stick and beach, knife and picnic table, or any other number of possible implements and surfaces. My nephew and niece are writers with their backward L's and B's. Anybody who has ever made a todo list is a writer. There are millions of writers updating their Facebook statuses and twittering even as I type this sentence - most of which are doing so at their own expense rather than for pay.

As far as how I perceive category A, I'll admit that there is some cynical, jealous part of me that thinks that Category A writers can be an elitist, pretentious lot which is a stereotype that I am sure is sometimes true. There has to be a certain amount of I-paid-my-dues-and-get-paid-for-what-I-do-so-my-writing-is-intrinsically-worth-more mentality that goes along with being a professional writer. In a way it's this very mentality that keeps the industry alive I suppose. But that's mostly sour grapes. There is nothing wrong with getting paid for writing. I would happily write for money though giving up on that idea has actually helped my writing grow. It erases some of the pressure. Not everything I write needs to be earth shattering genius that is going to change the world. Hell, it doesn't even need to be marketable. All in all, I think that idea is worth getting behind.

Writing is a good thing, whether it is a grocery list, a mushy love poem, a tweet on Twitter, a blog post, or Ulysses. Think of it as harmolodics, but for the written word.