Splatterfest 2007

I don't know how you can stand to read about my shit. That's not a euphymism about my day to day, either. I'm talkin' shit here.

My weekend started with a miserably hot dinner with friends on Friday, Puget Sound Pizza. My favorite pizza tasted off (this is a clue), this is the normally delicious St. Helens, a glorious concoction of pepperoni, italian sausage, jalapenos, and black olives on a New York style crust. I started sweating, and not from the mild peppers, I can assure you.

By 4:00 in the morning, I was rocking on the toilet, and shivering as though I was spraying my bowels onto the arctic shelf. I had a 102 degree temperature and had to be at a writing workshop in six hours. Cancel, you say?

No friends, it doesn't work like that. Number one, because even as a child, I had to go to school unless I had some life threatening illness. Second, my writing group had made a commitment to attend the fabulous Ms. Jessica Morrell's "Plot is a Verb" workshop at one of our own member's home. She was to travel from Portland, under the specification that she needed ten attendees to make it worth her while. So what happens?

That's right. You can guess.

By mid-week, last week, people started dropping out like Haight-Ashbury hippies (surgery, lack of funds, childcare issues). That left me trudging through familiar personal issue territory. Being a codependent people pleaser in a former life, despite much work toward apathy and self-indulgence, and possibly due to my flu-like symptoms, I was weak and back-slid into a struggle with attendance.

A battle I lost.

So, despite my wife's irritation, and loaded up with fever reducers, Dayquil, and Pepto, off I went to Olympia.

The workshop was wonderful, and Jessica amazes with her encyclopedic knowledge of the writing process. Somehow, I made it through. I got home and went straight to bed. It must have been a fast moving bug, because my fever broke overnight on Saturday, and I felt fine by Sunday afternoon.

This entry is my open letter of apology to any workshop attendee that may be reading this with their laptop on their knees from their own frigid toilet.

Damn you, childhood cyclical behaviors!!!

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