I didn't take my meds this morning. I'm going to start taking them in the evening right when I get home from work. If I time it right, I should be very sleepy by my bedtime and should sleep through the worst of the side effects.

So far the pattern is thus:

• Take the pill, and then for about 3 hours everything is fine.
• 3 to 4 hours after Pill Time, I begin to get high.
• 6 to 7 hours after Pill Time, I get sleepy (some people get wired at this point, but I start zonking out big time).
• 8 - 9 hours after Pill Time, I feel jittery & nauseous for about 2 - 3 hours (if I force myself to stay awake).

This weekend I did some writing while on the pill, and I have no idea if the writing is gibberish or not. I lost my ability to judge it. So, this may be a big problem, or it may not. I'll just forge ahead and then let someone read it.

This weekend I got bored with Earth and destroyed it, and from the rubble built Valhalla.

Why? Because it amused my daughter.

Okay, right now you're thinking I've gone total Looney Tunes, but no, this is from a video game that my daughter and I spent a lot of time playing this weekend. It's called Animal Crossing, on our GameCube, and with it you build little cities and populate them, kind of a kid's version of The Sims. I had a city called Earth and replaced it with Valhalla. Heh.

It was way too cold and miserable to spend outside, so we cozied up inside and vegged out. It was fun.

I spent most of the day in glorious goof-off-ed-ness. About the only thing I accomplished was the washing of dishes and the making of dinner (thus creating more dirty dishes). My manic depressiveness was calm today, neither up nor down.

I'm rewriting one of my stories, "Daytime For The Dead," and it's turning out completely different. I'm using some suggestions from my writers group and, especially, avoiding the things about the story that they disliked (and in retrospect, so do I). So, now, about the only thing it has in common with the first version is the name of the main character, and the setting. It's not really my setting, though. I'm blatantly robbing ... er, paying tribute to ... Salvador Dali. The story for the most part takes place inside his paintings. A lot of the plot changes came to me while I was doing dishes.

Weird. There's three places where I can always count on my muse to show up.

1. Taking a shower.
2. Driving.
3. Washing dishes.

This afternoon she materialized next to me while I was up to my elbows in dishwater suds. She sat on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs and popping some gum, and said, "Hey, drop all that moral crap from that story."

"Say what?"

"Drop it. No one wants to hear it, and you're only putting it in there because you think it's dramatic. It's not. It was dramatic when Mod Squad dealt with it in the 70's, but since then it's been done to death."

"Mod Squad? What?" She'd lost me.

"Think about it. What is the one common thread between all your literary heroes?"

I frowned, thinking hard. What in the hell was she talking about? My literary heroes over the years... Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, Mark Twain, Jonathan Lethem ... and now Chuck Palahniuk. They had something in common?

"They're all anarchists at heart," she told me. "They buck the rules, they're contrary, they're iconoclasts, and so are you. Write true to yourself."

It was like a punch in the gut. She was right. Lately I've been writing watered down stories, too cautions, void of rebellion. Milquetoast. "Eew!"

"That's right," she said. My muse hopped down off my kitchen counter, sauntered over to the refrigerator, and took my last beer. Then she was gone.

And I have this burning desire to write something.