Cracking Eggheads

I'm not writing.  I'm a triceratops stuck in the La Brea tar pits of emotion.  I'm out of gas,  milking inertia and riding the clutch to get as far as I can down the ramp before everything stops.  There's a cold, hard, smooth concrete wall at the bottom.  I'm frozen in an existential tazer, chastised with every breath. It's that moment in Missile Command when you've missed the incoming ICBM and can do nothing as your base is about to vaporized. Got any quarters left?

Note to self: May have to carefully edit this chapter.

I'm staring at the Space Needle wondering how John Grisham did it.  I'm told he wrote his first novel while working full-time in a law firm.  His bio on his website confirms this information.  I don't like 5 AM.  I like this hour.  Between 3:30 and 4:30 AM nearly the entire world is quiet.  If anything breathes,  or snores as the case may be,  you hear it.  The house pops and re-adjusts as it loses heat and your thoughts echo like tympani drums with each satin stroke of a key. That said,  this hour is unreasonable by any sane intellectual measure.  No civilized thought resides here in the dark, only the wild abandon of far more rational people than I dreaming away their day's problems.  No, this is the hour of mad men heated beyond the polite conventions of society,  wrestling dreams only slightly more tangible into being. This unsustainable, delicious hour has to be enjoyed as the rare treat that it is - with only th...