A dialog in the style of B.G.T. Stürmer

I lay tonight in a tub of suds and warm water. All the time I spend in front of computers has left me with a constant nagging pain between my shoulders - nothing serious, the kind of thing that hurts just enough to make for interesting small talk with hypochondriacs and to excuse me when I don't feel like helping a friend move. I've slept the last two nights on the floor of a school, though, so my descent into the soapy broth was a little taste of heaven, which I accompanied with a loud, drawn out groan that I like to imagine made me resemble a miniature, pink Godzilla retreating clumsily into a tiny sea.

Rose poked her head in to check on me a while later, and found me lost in my new copy of David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed In Flames, which I finished this evening and immediately began re-reading. I closed the book and held it above my head in one hand.

"This is how I want to write."

Rose is accustomed to my sudden and urgent passions, like the week I devoted to learning to ride the unicycle or the month I devoted to drawing a comic strip. And she would never discourage them, though she doubtless recognized that my declaration that I want to write words like David Sedaris's was akin to an announcement of my ambition to hit golf balls like Tiger Woords. She sat down on the toilet across from me, and answered in a special tone that lets me know that she's there for me a hundred and ten percent and recognizes that this epiphany is real and serious and not at all like the other three ultimately short-lived epiphanies I've announced this week. Shallow and feckless epiphanies, those, but this one, her eyes told me, was here to stay. How she manages this every time is one of those mysteries one doesn't want to probe too deeply.

"You mean for your blog?"

"No, that's the thing. This stuff won't work for my blog. It's long, and it's involved and personal and polished, and it reaches far into the past. My blog is for now, and it's friendly and simple. Like a blog should be. But I want to write humor about the macabre and the ugly and the complicated, and I want to write about the past."

The more I talked about it, the more real it became, until I realized that I was talking about something I really needed to do. The solution was pretty obvious, but also really ballsy - I need to try to write something that's not just going to go out in a newsletter or self-published on a blog.

The shape of how I'm going to do this is still utterly unclear to me. The first step is obvious, though - I need to write something and get it rejected.