It Just Distappeared!

I have read horror stories of writers who lost their work - a lightning strike that fries a computer in the backseat of a car, the only copy of a manuscript disappearing in the mail, the scene from Duplex where Ben Stiller's laptop catches fire and gets run over...

I have some sense of empathy for these folks.

No, make that sympathy.

I just lost all my writing from this year.

Back in February, I was serving jury duty. To pass the time (which was considerable, to say the least), I re-read Kurt Vonnegut's Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (a collection of essays, articles and speeches I first read when I was around 16) and, feeling inspired (and bored), began writing again.

I had a little black spiral-bound hardcover journal that my beautiful wife had bought me. I had intentionally saved it for something special. In it, I furiously scribbled thoughts, ideas, anecdotes, drawings, cows, asides, insights, blindsights, opinions, seeds, observations and what-not miscellaneous cerebral bric-a-brac. I have been working in that little book a lot, and had what I thought were some very funny ideas going.

I hadn't written in it for about a month and, last Friday, decided the time had come to get back into the swing of writing. Off I went to a local coffee shop, where I poured ink onto pen and came up with a manifesto / plan to follow for a summer of creative writing and mental pump priming.

Excitedly, I took my little book and a fistful of pens with me to Little Falls MN over the weekend, intending to write whatever I was inspired to write whilst in the woods.

I last saw my book at Linderbergh State Park. I sat it down - on a bench or a ledge somewhere - and, in my zeal to snap photos of flora and fauna and scurrying varmits, I forgot to pick it up.

It is gone.

All that work - gone.

Gone.

As my young nephews used to say when they were three or four, "It just distappeared!"

How foolish. How absolutely stupid of me.

Poof! Presto. Gone.

My hope is that someone found it and, intending to do the right thing and turn it in at the rangers' station, instead opened it, read the words, checked out the cow, and laughed so hard they decided to keep it.

Maybe they'll shelve it beside their copy of Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons.

Or Breakfast of Champions.

Either way, I would be honored.

So be it.

Tonight, I start again. I hope I'm still funny.