Heatwave Cause of Keyboard Freeze

            As I sat at my keyboard, a blank screen staring back at me; the weather was hot, humid, muggy, and miserable. All morning, I sat trying to come up with something for this week’s column.

            Nothing!

            I refused to believe that I had used up all the different combinations of the 26 letters in the alphabet or of the 217,000 words in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary says about 170,000 of those are in current use. Not here.

            In case you were wondering, another 47,000 are obsolete, such as overmorrow, meaning the day after tomorrow. Maybe that’s when something clever, humorous, satirical or even intelligent will come to mind. It didn’t. Or lunting, which means walking while smoking a pipe. That’s what I needed, smoke signals to show me an idea. It was about time for my afternoon walk. No, it was too hot to walk too.

            Searching the internet for some random factoid didn’t help. I thought maybe a little TV watching might do the trick. Surely something useless would spur my creativity. I did find one thing. Do you remember that commercial line “What’s in your wallet?” There you go, I thought, I’d write about what is in my wallet. Unfortunately, all I have is the prerequisite driver’s license, an insurance card, two credit cards (one expired – I’ll have to renew that one), the business card of that doctor of mine who moved away and a few bucks. I didn’t think I could squeeze enough words out of that.

            How about what’s in my junk drawer? Everyone has one, maybe that would spark an idea. Deep dive into the junk drawer it was. There were 23 keys of unknown origin, 12 pencils with broken tips, a stack of receipts for takeout food from assorted restaurants and a roll of Scotch tape which, for the life of me, I was unable to get started. There were two or three screwdrivers, a broken wristwatch and a half-dozen paper clips. But no good ideas. Forget the junk draw.

            I could write about the Olympics, but I already had. I didn’t want to repeat myself. I thought about the presidential election. No, things change too fast. The election wouldn’t do, and besides, that’s too easy to make fun of. It’s low hanging fruit as they say in politics. I do have some dignity left, you know.

            How about all the food recalls lately. Major grocery stores had pulled all their deli meats from their shelves. Cinnamon, cucumbers, green beans, ground beef and eggs have all had been recalled in recent weeks. Even chocolate, which is reported to contain heavy metals, was on the recall list. The experts say heavy metals in the bloodstream are not good. Duh! Fear not, though, it is just dark chocolate that presents the problem. So, all you chocolate addicts out there can rest assured you are safe.

            I figured I’d better skip a contaminated food column. Nobody wants to read about tainted food. And, it occurred to me, I had already written about that too.

            I gave up. It was too hot to write.

            Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and happily retired writer. His newspaper columns appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.

Thoughts on…

By Dick Morgado