Write It Down

It's Saturday morning, and I am cleaning out my pockets from the night before. There are a pile of one-dollar bills, a couple of fives, and a lot more twenties than what I thought I had. I must have used the ATM to get that last round of drinks. Among the cash are two free drink chips, and a pack of matches. I don't smoke. I use matches, or whatever is handy, to write down ideas for stories when I am drinking in a bar. You would be surprised how many ideas I come up with after a couple of vodkas. I open the matches, and yes, there it is, I have scrawled something inside. The problem is that my handwriting is so bad that I don’t have a clue what it is that I wrote down. It looks like I wrote something about 'twelve years'. Mark and I have been together for twelve years, so maybe it’s an idea for a story about living with Mark. I have also written down something that looks to me like ‘tracker scalp 1997’. What the hell does that mean?

I have always had horrible handwriting. My scribbles today don't look much different than what I did in first grade. My cursive penmanship is even worse. No matter how much I try to write beautiful flowing letters, it all comes out wrong. When I send out a greeting card and include a nice heartfelt note, it looks more like a chimpanzee wrote it. If you add alcohol to the equation, my writing becomes totally incomprehensible. Thank goodness for the computer. At least with Microsoft Word, I can communicate clearly, and do it in at least a hundred and fifty different fonts. As for what I wrote down in the bar Friday night, I guess I will have to down a few vodkas and re-read that matchbook.