Guess I need a real job

I read most of Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" this afternoon, after a healthy morning of pancakes and packing. It told me that Douglas Miller was right when he said, "Writers don't make anything. We make about a dollar."

Later this afternoon, as I pondered this wisdom, I tried to explode a balloon merely by continuing to inflate it with my lungpower (as opposed to introducing to its latex epidermis the business end of any foreign, sharp object). I didn't think I would succeed, but it turns out that my lungs are, in fact, less likely to explode than is a bulb of elastic. My wife made this discovery at the same time that I did, but, alas! I had failed to inform her about my project, and the very moment that the balloon exploded like Hiroshima and flapped fragments in a welt across my throat, she jumped out of her skin onto the ceiling and clung there to the lamp fixture as the sausages she had been cooking bounced greasily across the kitchen floor.

The upshot of our resulting conflagration was that I probably need to get a real job. Right now, I'm creeping around the living room, looking for shards of bright elastic.