Today, while at annual conference in Muncie, I decided to do some writing from the front seat of my decrepit 2000 Windstar (109,000 miles on the odometer). Needless to say, it was hot sitting there in the idle van, my shirt growing dark with sweat rings, my brow dripping away the five hundred milligrams of salt I had consumed in my french fries at lunch.
Still, when a guy has to write, he has to write . . . and as the old joke goes: Where do writers do it? Answer: In the front seat of a hot van. And yes, I was writing so furiously the van was oscillating. (If this van's a rockin', don't come a knockin'.)
But writing in a hot van, my attentions were attune with the temperature and I found myself writing parody poems of the great "Poet of the Yukon" Robert Service. I was dreaming of snow and ice, and considering how some of Service's poems may have been lost and unpublished, like this one stanza I completed before I passed out from heat exhaustion:
The man who thrives
And not simply survives
Is not the one who might know
How to make lots of money
Or work while it's sunny
But can track his pee stains in the snow.
Of course, I'm still in the process of refinement, as you can tell. But I'm a lot cooler now just thinking of snow.
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