When you're struck with writer's block, you're supposed to just write anything. This is what I just churned out instead of my next column:
I was awakened by my phone. You got used to that living on The Big Island. It's already noon on Wall Street by the time the rosy fingers of dawn touch the wine-dark seas of Kona. Plus I have narcolepsy, a disease which tends to kick in at particularly inopportune times, as if advancing a plot that otherwise would flounder over flimsy connections . Narcolepsy is a crippling disease, but one which involves no physical deformations and yet is exotic enough so that most people have heard of it; I find it lends me an air of vulnerability that causes men to underestimate me and women to swoon. "How may I be of service?" I said, unconsciously forming the words by which Parsifal proved himself worthy of receiving the Holy Grail from Anfortas, the Fisher King. Or so you'd believe from a mere surface reading of the medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. "Mr. O'Brien? Mr. Lawrence O'Brien?" Came the breathy voice of a woman -- a voice that betrayed her as filled with worry and that further betrayed her as the owner of a cutting intellect that kept lesser men away. And that even further betrayed her as beautiful, a brunette, taller than average, with gray -- no, green -- eyes. "Only my publisher calls me Lawrence," I said, rising from bed and noting that it was a little after 5AM by the position of 'Iwakeli'i, the male frigate bird, the W-shaped constellation known to the West as Casssiopeia, the queen whose insult of the Nereid sea nymphs dictates her constellation never touches the sea. Whose circumpolar orbit allows it, along with The Big Dipper, whose Hawaiian name is irrelevant but happens to be Na Hiku, to serve as utterly reliable timepieces for those who disdain -- or distrust -- the 32,768 oscillations per second of a quartz crystal exposed to an electrical current as well as for those whose quartz watches don't have Indiglo and thus are quite difficult to read in the dark. "Call me Larry." "Well…Larry…I saw you on Larry King and--"
"Stop right there," I said. I was in no mood to let her go further, beautiful leggy brunette or no. Programming legends like myself and, say, Don Box, draw beautiful women to us like moths to flame, which are drawn, not because of the heat, but because they are genetically programmed to maintain a steady orientation to the brightest light in the night sky -- the moon, whose name is Luna and which is paired with Cassiopeia in the easily-confirmable-by-skeptical-readers Web site location[ ]{style="mso-spacerun: yes"}http://www.pbase.com/image/33397294. Except with us programming legends it wasn't our simulacra of the reflection of the Sun to which beautiful women were compelled to maintain a steady orientation, but to our knowledge of esoterica, which is too close to an anagram of "eroticas" to be a coincidence.
Hmmm, 59,530 more words like that and you know Tom Hanks is on board. But maybe I should wait to see if National Treasure has legs...
I'm going to go for a swim...