On a tiny table covered with wax driblets and exotic bowels filled with burning incense, a writer was creating a story. He stopped many times and often busied himself with his flickering candles, making sure they were fit for burning steadily. Or trying to clean up a wax spill. Getting up to find a putty knife to scrape it off his table. "There is a story to write," he told himself. Even as he got up again to busy himself with some small task.


When he wrote it was, in his imagination, a heroic battle with writer's block that lasted for hours and hours, with pages and pages filled with the skilled text of a true writer. It was a fight, that it was, for half a page, maybe. He would count the lines he wrote, believed they were pages and congratulated himself on his menial accomplishments. As reality set in, he became disgusted with himself and his writing. He blew out his candles, turned on the lights, and went downstairs to sit in front of the TV for a few hours.


Then he wouldn't write for a very long time.


In a good month, he might go and sit dismally at the computer for a few minutes before getting up again in a wave of self-pity. All the while this was going on, he imagined books and books of his writing on the best-seller shelves at Boarders and Barnes and Nobles. He had no idea what the books were about, but he made up silly and stupid names that at the time sounded like classic masterpieces or breath-taking adventure or rip-roaring comedies.


Then, in that mind frame, he would go over to Staples and buy more paper, lock himself in his room and write a few lines of drivel. Then the cycle would epeat. Nothing would ever change without outside help, which of course was impossible as he had distanced himself from everyone. And, in turn, no one really knew or cared about him: fuel for his self-pity. Sometimes he kept a sort of journal or diary, where everyone was heartless! And cruel! And he was a poor, misunderstood soul. Then, later, he would look at what he wrote in his diary and think; I'm not that kind of person! I don't want to be that kind of person!