Hot Peppers

"I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time..." - Malcolm Reynolds, to YoSaffBridge, in Trash.

Once when I was giving a reading of a short story, someone came up to me afterwards and wanted to know where I'd gotten such strange ideas. Had something like that happened to me? Did I know someone who actually did that?

No, I said, of course not. It's just fiction. It comes out of my imagination, and I write it down.

Which is true. But it occurs to me that I don't necessarily seek out the quietest and most pleasant of scenarios, either. Among my magical powers appears to be an unerring instinct for weirdness.

I attract the oddest of ducks, and am often attracted to them in turn. "You like eccentric men," said a male friend of mine once, in a musing and amused tone of voice.

Yes. Yes I do.

All of which is to say, wow, that was a weird day. I'm sorry that I can't, of course, give you all the details, but they're private, and weird though the other player in my little Shakespearean comedy may be, he still deserves to have his privacy.

However, I will say this. Perhaps it is the writer in me that dives unerringly straight forward into weirdness, knowing how it's likely to turn out (which is to say, weird, though I never really know the specific shape it will take), and knowing that I will get grrrreat dialogue out of it.

Perhaps not. I might just have an unfortunate penchant for Men with Issues. Bland is boring. I like some spice, even when it burns the shit out of my tongue.