How to Write

 

  The problem with being a young writer is that to be a good writer you need to have developed enough wisdom that you actually have something to say. 
  One truth you often hear from the elders is that  you are only as old as you feel; so I am pretty damn old now.  When I was a young, learning writer, I decided that I would  practice writing until I was old and experienced enough that I actually had something to say, so now, I do, so you may  ask me about any question and I should be able to give you a brief and compelling answer.   
       Alternatively, you may believe that, as Robert Frost so cleverly put it,  learning to write is simply a matter of learning how to have something to say.  On the other hand, as Frost maybe learning to write is really more a matter of learning how to say something, anything, just so that  you   convey some relevant information, entertain or piss the reader off, or at least drag them with you all the way to the end.
      If there are no more questions, I will have to be getting along now.  Marshal? “What is the meaning of Lice.”
        Bite me Marshal, you joker.  Thanks for being here for us.  Bye now.

My Collegue the Carpenter Ant

 


  I sleep deep, and if I dream down there  I don’t   remember it, but as I get closer to waking I experience shuddering images of roof- rot, rising damp,  mice- shredded insulation and so on: all of which   follow me from that half-sleep  into the day time, even as I drive down a street, painfully aware of the condition of each roof I pass.
   
   I don’t worry about Carpenter ants though. They may be foreign and invasive, but  Carpenter ants are my friend, and not because were work the same trade, which is not exacctly the case. They are your friend too, if you only know.
        Despite the common belief, Carpenter Ants do not saw lumber from your studs, and use it to stick-frame little ant houses of their own. Looking for a home, they simply seek out rotten wood they can easily tunnel through and hollow out. If you destroy the ants, you will need to get new ones, although if you replace the rotted wood, and take care of your lousy leaking roof or the place where the gardener piled the dirt up against the clapboards inorder to plant your Azelias. 
    After that is taken care of, you should consider a roof job, as the shingles that were put on, maybe thirty years ago, had a twenty five year warranty at the most and, anyway, that roof has too low a slope for shingles to seal it and should have been done with metal, rubber, or at least double coverage asphalt roll roofing, and if you don’t plan to keep the eves trough clear, it would be better to just leave it off after the roof job, seeing as it has foot high locust trees growing in it, and serves to back up the runn off so that it is rotting the eves.  
         Clearing gutters well forested as that, I sometimes find populations of mature earth worms, which I am careful to transport to a better place.  Worms are my friends.