the post where i'm all 'this is so not really a post...'

When I was a kid, I used to sit under one of the oak trees that grew in our front yard, and I'd write. Every day. For hours. Because I felt the world (aka "no one") ached to read my prose and the occasional retooled General Hospital script featuring more of Dr. Noah Drake making out with a mysterious female character by the name of 'My Real Name,' I'd fend off requests from my friends to go on bike rides, and would curl up in the fetal position to avoid being stepped on when the tree and I'd become second base during impromptu kickball games. I spent so much of my formative teenage years BEING second base that the characters in my Judy Blume-lite stories GOT to second base long before I did.

Never mind I didn't even KNOW what second base was for a long time. A very long time.

I know. Be quiet.

I said I KNOW!

Anyway, I loved those trees because, even though I was perhaps mocking them by bringing a folder of loose-leaf paper out to them every day, they were always there for me, and let me just be. There wasn't a lot of just getting to be in my house when I was growing up. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I wanted to be out of that house, and believed that maybe my lame ass stories and soap opera love scenes might one day be a way. At the very least, it would get me through some particularly long days.

As stories go, I grew up. The trees grew up. I shunned paper for a computer, and nature, being the real bitch it can be sometimes, refused to provide me an electrical outlet close by in which to plug in my laptop, thus effectively taking me away from the shade of my front yard oak trees. Sure, maybe we didn't call each other every day, but the trees and me? We were connected. I was sure I'd one day have the chance to prove to them that the years I'd spent with the knot at the base of the one's trunk poking into my back had paid off.

How do you prove these kinds of things to trees? I don't know. I always assumed I'd have time to figure that out. Well, damn if that Shel Silverstein wasn't the wise one when he wrote A Giving Tree, eh? Cut to this week. My Mom called to tell me she'd had the trees, well over 40 years old and marred by disease, removed. The yard where I wrote many an untitled epic of lame teenage fiction is now a bare patch of lumpy grass and dirt. I know to most people that's no big deal, but to me, it's kind of hard to believe.

I know, I know. I'm writing about trees, then no trees, and you're wondering when I'm going to get to the good stuff (assuming you come here thinking 'Yeah! Good stuff!', - or 'Whoo! Thanks for the lack of vibrator talk today!' - and if you do, then please let me say thank you a whole bunch of times. Then let me add that the vibrators? They are lovely!), but I really think that the demise of my trees has resulted in wave of writer's block that has come over me this week. Seriously. I am bereft of blog fodder.

It's either that, or it's my sons' raging refusal to do anything adorable this week for me to write about, and/or the lack of customers at the bookstore facing my wrath (the girl who kept saying "offer" rather than "author" notwithstanding). It's probably the latter, but the former sounds more poetic and inspiring, thus, I shall stick with it.

So I beg you, good people of the Internets, come to my aid in the comments. Leave me a query, an idea, a complete stalker fan letter where you offer to make out with me ala Dr. Noah Drake. Whatever you wish. Be my trees, please, and we'll see if I can take something you've given me and run with it in a future post. If you don't, you'll have to hear me go on and on about the vibrators, and at some point, I have got to think you're going to draw the line on that topic.

P.S. I realize this sounds hauntingly like FTN's request to fluff him this week, but it's not. I mean, not really. But so what if it is, OK? He's him, and I'm me (Or are we? Hmmmm...), and there's not an original idea anywhere in the blog world anyway, so if he has a problem with it, he can take it up with me personally. Also, the answers to your first five questions are: I love you, too; Yes, they are; No, that part comes from a box; Why do you care?; and I've done that before, and no, I won't be doing it again.