The Man in the Ketchup-Stained Suit

Memo to Self:

Self, in order for dramatic narrative to have any chance at all for becoming charged, gripping narrative rather than Wikipedia-like information dump, the text needs a second, opposing presence, working against the main line.

Note the close parallel to counterpoint in music, where two themes are presented simultaneously, and where such composers as J.S. Bach had such an ear for it that he could make the second theme by reversing the progressions within the first.

In the text versions, you can consider using the setting or some necessary aspect, say dress or costume, as the second theme against which the first plays out.  Let's swing for the fence, in which case we use dress or costume as the counterpoint.  

Fellow shows up for a job interview or to initiate a romantic setting in which to propose the permanent arrangement of marriage to his lady friend.  Both are straightforward.  Depending on the writer's imagination, a job interview or proposal of marriage are at least polar in their possibilities, hired for the job or not, marriage proposal accepted or not.

Against these, let's say his suit is itchy, his shirt too small, his pants too tight at the waist.  Or let's say that, through an unforeseen accident, he has a conspicuous ketchup stain on his lapel.  In any of these cases, he is in effect, applying for a job against a background of some close-to-hand discomfort.

You like the potential in this set-up for one of your favorite types of interaction between characters, edgy dialogue spoken without any need for interior monologue.

"Ah, I see you've noticed my stain."

"I do my best to be non-judgmental at times like these.  You might say, look at the entire picture instead of being distracted by a mere Jell-o stain."

"Actually, it isn't Jell-o; it's ketchup.  You see, I was outside in the waiting room, when some fellow with a hot dog--"

"I'd have sworn it was Jell-o.  Raspberry."

"The thing is, I can't abide Jell-o. Wouldn't want you thinking this was a Jell-o stain."

"To me, Jell-o will always be the quintessential comfort food.  Reminds me of my youth.  Jell-o moulds were a significant treat back at the orphanage."

"Yes, well I hope you don't think--I mean, I understand the sociological implications of Jell-o."

This exchange is an example of what you like to think of as your signature dialogue, digressive from the matter at hand but subversive of one character's vision of him- or herself.

The B line or counterpoint could also be the restaurant the man takes his girlfriend and stained suit to, in order to propose marriage.  In addition to the stain, the restaurant is over air conditioned or significant for not being air conditioned at all; it is too crowded, too loud, or sepulchral in its projected loneliness.

The girlfriend is all poised to say yes, but the counterpoint piles weight upon weight upon the man in the ketchup-stained suit.  He tries his best to cope, to retain his poise, to project sans souci and leadership.  She may even see this to the point of appreciating it.  But we can't have it end well.  In fact, if "it" does end well, we shall feel cheated.  

When we embark on such a scene, in such an inhospitable setting, we know the outcome in advance, don't we?  We know she will wish to get herself out of that restaurant stat, rapidamente, ASAP, with all deliberate speed.  We also know that even as she is leaving, he is calling after her, insisting.  "It was a man with a hot dog.  You have to believe that."

And because, as readers, we are dramatic cynics, we know she will have the last words, called out over the din as she departs the restaurant and the scene, "People don't put ketchup on hot dogs.  People put ketchup on hamburgers."

This last observation is a delicious non sequitur cherry atop the banana split, a reminder that rational things may happen in Reality, but they get standing room only tickets for story.

The Prometheus Treatment

From the various accounts of Sisyphus before he was set to his eternal punishment by Zeus, you are able to piece together a prototype character whose likeness forms the basis of many outstanding scoundrels throughout oral and written literature.

Some accounts of his deeds show him having on travelers to his country, working great mischief to provide income streams for his preferred lifestyle, and taking on epic figures from the panoply of gods and goddesses.  The more versions of his misdeeds you hear, the greater your sense of the justice that was done when he was sentenced, then set out to perform an eternity at hard labor.

These are the stuff of which myth and story are made.  You have even added two variations of your own to the well-known sentence of Sisyphus being sentenced to rolling a rock up a hill, watching it roll down, waiting for the rock to come to a standstill, then pushing the rock back to the crest of the hill.  Your first variation has Sisyphus growing fed up with the repetitious and meaningless nature of his sentence, demanding to be brought before his judge, jury, and execution squad, Zeus, to voice his complaints.

Zeus listens, nods, snaps his fingers, to call two of his factotums to his side.  "All right,"  he tells them, "Sisyphus is off the rock.  Take him to the the mountains and sign him into the Prometheus treatment."

Remember, Sisyphus has been portrayed as a Trickster, a scoundrel, a fast talker, a true nave.  "Wait a minute,"  he insists.  "What is the Prometheus treatment?"

One of the factotums explains. "Every day, Prometheus is tied to the side of a mountain, whereupon an eagle would devour his liver.  Because Prometheus was not a mortal, his liver could grow back in time for the eagle's next meal."

"Excuse me,"  Sisyphus exclaims.  "I have to get back to my rock."

Your second proposal for the Sisyphus story is to have him set upon by his wife, who is walking alongside him while he pushes the rock up the hill.  "You don't call, you don't write.  We never see you.  The kids are asking for their father.  Am I to tell them their father is a workaholic?"

You have gone beyond these two variations on local themes.  In recognition of the archetypal position Sisyphus has taken relative to narrative, story, and drama, you have dedicated a metric to his memory.  You call it The Sisyphus Cycle.  The great use of this cycle is to measure story beginnings after the orbit of the story has been discovered.

The explanation of the Sisyphus Cycle has its origins in the fact of the chronological order of earlier stories.  Before The Sisyphus Cycle, story was linear.  To punish Sisyphus for his frequent devious acts, Zeus sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, watching it roll down, waiting for it to come to rest, then repeating the process again.  And again.  Throughout eternity.

This has a nice cause-and-effect sound to it, but it is linear, which is not a good idea for any story.  Sisyphus's story has an orbital feel to it; It can begin at any point in that orbit.  Furthermore, the point of beginning will influence the effect of the story.

With The Sisyphus Cycle in mind, we may approach any story, see where its most memorable opening takes place, then wonder if the story could have been told to a greater or different effect than it has, were it to have begun elsewhere in its own orbit.

We are used to a number of our long cherished stories having in medias res beginnings, The Iliad and Moby-Dick to name but two.  The more you look at modern story, you see it starting later and later.  As an agonizing example, Emma Donogue's Room, which begins on the fifth birthday of the narrator, which means his mother had already been imprisoned in that tiny room for over five years.

It is going on forty years since you had a dramatic presentation of how important a well-placed beginning mattered.  You sat in a restaurant on the Sunset Strip, having called in a chip with an agent you knew.  You were meeting a man whose works have sold not mere millions of copies, think hundreds of millions of copies.  You'd been reminded in a patronizing way, a few months earlier, that the publisher you worked for was a massmarket publisher.

The author with whom you lunched, Louis L'Amour, was a gracious, dedicated writer and a bit of a historian.  Had you been successful in your goal of switching from his present publisher to the one for whom you were editor, there is no telling what directions your publishing career might have taken.

"Most writers begin their stories too soon,"  L'Amour began the conversation.  This was your moment to carry the conversation forth.

"And,"  you said, "they stay too long."

You did not have to say any more.  You had said enough.  The genie came out of the bottle and for the next two and a half hours, he went through much of the canon of literature from the West, then led you to writers of the American West, where, as well he helped you define one of your strengths as an editor--knowing where to begin.

The way such things work, you needed longer to fit the information with comfort to your own work.  The way other things work, you never saw L'Amour in person again.  But you didn't have to, did you?

Spare Changes

Most mornings, you wake cheerful, eager for the scheduled events of the day.  You proceed with relative certainty, knowing full well the potential for what in fiction classes you'd call destabilizing events.  

Those classroom events are the "stuff happens" events.  These events come along in Reality, not so much because you forgot to do something you were supposed to or even that you didn't take enough care of something requiring care; they happen by random chance.

When events come along in Story, they are part of a design or recipe.  Bouillabaisse and cioppino are in essence the same thing, seafood soup, separated by garlic and culture.  Story is a literal and figurative broth into which things are placed, some with ambitions to escape the broth or the fate of being caught in a concoction.

In the Reality of your days, you are both confident you can engage what is scheduled and alert to the possibility you might have to cope with some sudden eruption of circumstance.  You are by degrees comfortable, happy, alert.

In the world of story, neither you as reader nor writer have the existential latitude you have in Reality.  You've learned by painful example how the inherent nature of story is to have someone like yourself or not at all like yourself set to wake up the way you wake up most days.  

Then, something happens.  You would not be in a story if nothing happened.  If things were to get better, you'd come away with the firm belief that you were living in a commercial or some propaganda of expensive production values.

Under ordinary circumstances, the mood you awaken to within Reality undergoes few changes, leaving you, at the end of most days a bit tired, a bit disturbed by the world of political phenomena going on about you, but still identifiable as a cheerful, eager person.  

When Reality presents you with challenges to your equipoise, you still proceed in relative harmony. perhaps undone somewhat by day's end, but nowhere close to such conditions as snippy, sharp, snarky, irritated, defensive, or frustrated.  Taking a moment here to commit the pathetic fallacy by imparting human traits and qualities to inanimate objects, you escalate the effects of Reality.  Now, Reality has it in for you, has an agenda, decides to throw some serious stuff in your path, decides to mess with you.

The most common vehicle by which Reality messes with you is the vehicle of change, a known and respected quality in Story.  Whether we are consciously aware of the fact or not, we are in large part drawn to Story because of our expectations of change, in particular change that arrives by surprise.  The surprise should be plausible and, unlike Reality, should not, in Story, come in the deus ex machina sense, rather as the kind of thing that could and does happen in Reality.

Change is the great disturber, the mover of boundary, the lengthening of time needed to do something that could once be done in a shorter duration, or the reversal, something shortened that at one time was not so short.

When you think of Change, you find it difficult not to visualize some of the Hindu gods and goddesses, tasked with destroying time and place, taking life and, thus sending the unfortunate to rebirth and yet another spin around the track.

In recent times, two changes have left you feeling as though grand, old Navaho rugs have been yanked from under you, one of them a Two Gray Hills, the other Teec Nos Pos.  You'd had an awareness each could change, just as, at one point, when picking Sally up from the Your Pals Pet Hospital, you were aware that there might not be too many such times left.

Change is a Cosmic fuse, being lit.  Difficult to tell when such fuses are lit or how long the particular fuse it, but not difficult to know the match has been applied, the flame initiated and on its way.

All about you are burning fuses, things combining with oxygen.  All about you, things are changing.  By tomorrow morning, the you who shaved this morning will have to shave again.

Because you are a glass is half full sort, awareness of change means you apply more focus on what is at hand, soaking it in, finding places in your memory to store it.  Last week, you received your last haircut from someone who has understood the anarchy of your cowlicks for twenty-five years.  This week, you have learned how the equivalent of a second home/office is no longer an option.  The Cafe Luna, where you often have breakfast, occasional lunches, and at other times remarkable dinners, and where your Saturday morning workshop has been held for the past five years, has closed.

At one time, you had Two Gray Hills and Teec Nos Pos rugs.  At one time, your hair, such as it is now, was cut by Maryelle.  At one time, you could have pasta with squid ink or a scrumptious seafood pasta.

The simple recipe for a long story is, Something happens and somebody changes.  A recipe of slightly more complexity is, Something happens, somebody changes, and so does the reader.

Characters Who Help the Reader Define His Own Craziness

For as long as you can recall, the eclectic and varied nature of your memory has been remarked upon by friends, associates, and students, among them one psychiatrist who asked in so many words, "How the fuck are you able to remember so many off-the-wall things?"

At one point, such recognition got you to worrying if you should try to do something, say memorizing more conventional things, such as the names of National Parks, or all fifty-eight of the names of the California Counties.  No help.  For one thing, you couldn't with any ease put to memory facts and names that were of no interest to you.  Then you began to see your memory, which is to say the things you could pull forth with ease, as an index of who you were.

You are often reminded of your memory when you find yourself along shortcut roads, taken to avoid clogged freeways.  These roads are often sites for self-storage facilities, places where people store things that were once of consequence to them.  Now, because of size constraints or simple prioritizing of what goes where, materials in which the owner sees some potential await the call to active duty.

In that metaphoric sense, your memory often waits in the same manner a minor league baseball player awaits the call to move up to The Show, the Major Leagues.  You can never tell when it will be useful to know a cheetah can run at the rate of ninety miles per hour for about thirty seconds.  Anything longer and the cheetah is at risk of stroke.  You can never tell when it will be useful to remember the Italian name, Poldo Sbaffini, for that great, hamburger-eating friend of Popeye, J. Wellington Wimpy.

To your belief, there is no functional use to your storehouse of oddities than the facts of it being vast and interesting. By syllogistic logic, you are, therefore, or ergo, interesting to yourself.  

Ta ta to legions of individuals whose eyes you'd see glazing over with boredom or uncertainty when you held forth in conversation.  But this was a vital lesson; soon you made the connection that too much detail, in particular arcane detail, in conversation or story made the listener or reader quick to recall a previous engagement.  If you were to realize your wish of becoming a storyteller, you had to learn how to engage, not repel, the reader.

For one thing, it makes sense that you would know Poldo Sbaffini; you liked Popeye, you liked the Wimpy character even more so, and your literary agent comes from a family with deep roots in Italy and the Italian language.  Your agent's sister is a movie critic for Italian newspapers.

For another thing, you are looking at the personal copies of your recent short story collection, sent you by your publisher, in a real sense mourning the fact that two remarkable persons, who offered blurbs whenever you needed them, were not alive to provide the blurbs.  Gracious thanks to those who did, but these two, Charles Schulz, and Bob Kane remind you of some of the many characters beyond J. Wellington Wimpy, stored in the vaults of your memory.

From Schulz, the unsurpassed ensemble theater of characters associated with the comic strip, Peanuts.  From Bob Kane, one of your earliest ventures into memorable characters from Batman.  In a sense, the genie is out of the bottle with these two.  Although Batman is often lumped with super heroes, you have no such individuals in your vaults.  You liked Smokey Stover, Major Hoople, the entire Toonerville Trolley ensemble, and those unforgettables, Ignatz Mouse, Offisa Pup, and the eponymous Krazy Kat.

From Gene Ahern's strip, The Squirrel Cage, came the bearded hitchhiker, whose incomprehensible utterance, "Nov shmoz kapop," echoes in your memory to this day when you find it necessary to exclaim something that might otherwise have been quite obscene.  The beauty of this is the possibility of those hearing you uttering it will think you are swearing in Yiddish.

Names beget names and pictures:  Prince Valiant, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, and one of your boyhood favorites, Jungle Jim.  Pogo.  Calvin and his magnificent imaginary tiger, Hobbes.

There are times when you look at lists of memorable characters such as Ahab, Ishmael, Tom, Huck, Becky Sharp, Little Nell, and both the Melville and Dickens Pips.  You look at and remember Antonia, Hester Prynne, and the legion of Louise Erdrich characters, thinking, "You guys got me into this.  I followed you all over the place, through the hardscrabble with the Joads and into the poignant sting of Lenny and George."  You think about Julian English and Amory Blaine and Dick Diver and Jay Gatz.
They had a part in it.  So did Marlow and his American spin-off, Philip.  Spade, the Continental Op.  Gantry.  Babbitt.  You guys got me into this game.

Then someone cuts you off on the freeway or the people ahead of you in the ordering line at Cafe Luna can't make up their mind if they want soup or salad with the sandwich and you can hear "Nov schmoz kapop," coming forth.  And you remember as well the characters who got you into this from the times when the comics looked so interesting that you knew you couldn't wait to learn to read.  All characters who helped you define your own craziness.

"Earning Out," Black Ink for Writer and Publisher

In the act of leaving your studio for a strategy dinner with your literary agent, you found in the mailbox a letter from a publisher containing a royalty check for a handsome sum, bordering on impressive, a handwritten note on a Post-it informing you it was all yours; the agent's commission had been sent.

This put you in not only a good mood, a reflective one as well.  There have been other royalty checks, which are in effect the result of you having paid off an interest free loan through the sale of enough copies of your books to offset the advance on which you lived riotously or precariously while writing said book.

Royalty checks of any amount mean you have, to use the publishing term you so often heard in sales meetings, "earned out."  You and the publisher are now on a path of black ink and, for you, celebratory dinners in keeping with the amount within the sum brackets.  

Royalty checks of any amount mean a raucous parade, a kind of New Orleans Mardi Gras parade of new ideas for new projects, all trying to convince you of the wise choice you made in choosing this sort of life

The reflections come from the irony and fact of your not always knowing which things will be accepted for publication.  In fact, there were times when things you thought certain to be published were not and things you thought had no chance of being published were.  The reflections, although somewhat of a critical nature, are all positive.  Given the amount of reading you do, you have a sense of your abilities analogous to your credit score.

In the past, your credit score was borderline awful, a haunting, parallel line to your writing ability.  Through your efforts, stubbornness, and some possible measure of ability, you were able to cause some growth. Those times and circumstances have changed.  You cannot affix a number to your writing score, and although you're aware--by accident--of your credit score, you know it is pushing the high edges of good.  From past experiences, you understand how unwise it would be of you to take either of these parallel lines for granted. 

You are more interested in your writing score,to the point where you frequently practice some aspect of craft, or writing notes and dialogues to yourself, such as these notes, in which you try to spell out for yourself your visions on language, story, theme, character, and point of view so that, knowing your approach, you will not be imitating things from past eras you found useful; you will be seeing composition from your own vision.

Starting around September of last year, you began attracting a particular sort of comment on these vagrant essays and entries unlike any others in your eight years of blogging.  Not that you get that many comments of any sort, but those you do get are from friends checking in, long lost students rediscovering you, and in one extreme case, a realtor, offering to get you in the house of your dreams, provided you were willing to move to Pahrump, Nevada.

The comments of which you speak all lead to sites where you, with little effort, can secure well-written papers for nearly any college-level class, with no possibility of plagiarism.  True enough, many of the comments introducing you to these sites betray an English with some foreign locution or accent.  What these commentators don't know is the way your job, during your last two years as an undergraduate, led you to a dramatic uptick in grades and understanding.

From three thirty in the afternoon until twelve ten the following morning, you worked in the night office of the Associate Press, the low man on the totem pole of reporters, editors, and teletypists, in addition to state, local, national, and international wires (the technology of the time) which fed data to all AP subscribers.

You sometimes got to write so-called "shorts," such as LOS ANGELES--The Egg market closed hire today.  Or, DOVER, ENGLAND--No one attempted to swim the English Channel today.  Maybe tomorrow.

Shorts, the AP style and usage guide, and the journalism basics of a pyramid writing style, with the important material first, followed by lesser facts, found their way into your essay type questions and your more focused take on the materials you were asked to absorb.

These comments on your blog writings serve as lessons of equal value to your times at the Associated Press.  No matter how earnest and focused your approach, you cannot control the effect it will have on all who read it.  You have to be satisfied with, in essence settle for, the effect it has on you.

A Long Time Coming: Story with Too Much Description

 In the same spirit of your preferences for a wide variety of music, your interest in story stretches across the spectrum of drama.  You began getting the hang of story with so-called boy's adventure stories, because you were a boy, but ever more to the point because you craved adventure.

Your tastes in music took similar turns, your earliest preferences being what are still grouped under the tent of program music.  Of course, you would like the Overture to William Tell, because it was a direct link to a boy's adventure story.  

But there were musical versions of historical events (Tchaikowsky's Eighteen Twelve Overture), individuals (Richard Strauss' Til Eulenspiegel), and places (Ferde Grofe's The Grand Canyon Suite) which in their way were musical equivalents of adventure.  And there was swing and big-band jazz, and small band jazz, such as Count Basie, which led you across the musical aisle to chamber music.

Of even greater course, your tastes in both mediums grew with the pleasures you found in each, how each could express ideas and feelings.  In addition to feelings, each medium, story and music, was based in time.  Each has tempo, pace, an accelerated sense of movement toward a resolution. When you became aware of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, you were disturbed by the thought that you'd never be able to hear "the way it turned out."  

Well before you began getting the hang of how story was supposed to approach some form of resolution, you spent hours listening to classical music for its inherent sense of form.  Of the many reasons you began to favor Beethoven, the most obvious was the way you could always tell when he was through with something.  He made sure you knew.  The early you mixed metaphors of you seeing him as Donald Duck, losing his calm, growing impatient until, goddamnit, this is the end, you understand me?

Come on, admit it; you were well along in the writing game before you saw more of a direct connection between notes and words, pacing, tempo, theme, sub-theme, subtext.  As of this minute, you can say, every moment in a story should have some direct bearing on the story before us.  Even distractions or the verbal equivalents of cadenzas ought to have relevance, adding notes of character and feeling rather than mere  melodic design.

Most of the fiction authors with whom you grew up still allowed themselves to step into the story from time to time, reminding us how "Fred's steely-gray eyes narrowed," as though every significant time Fred narrowed his eyes, he was aware of their color.  Sometimes, when you're picking out a shirt or a sweater, you're pairing them with the hazel of your eyes, but you have not gone around flashing your hazel eyes at anyone for a number of years.

Of even greater course yet, knowing one thing not to do such as having a character aware of his/her own eye color, was not going to get you anywhere unless you had a compelling story from word one, sentence one.  Story may not, in the long run, be everything, but it is not subordinate to detail.  With some writers, including those you admire, story can be subordinate to character, but character, then, must be of awesome power to bring the reader along.

While you were in the early midst of comparing music with story, you were quite fond of believing--and announcing to all within earshot--how characters are remembered more so than the story in which they appeared.  Yes, Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread.  And yes, Inspector Jaivert set after him once he'd escaped from prison, but do we remember all the twists and turns?  Do you always remember the pathos of the ending?

Many, many of the authors you came up on were not even from your century; you had, in effect, to grasp story the way their conventions grasped it, then go back to remove such tells from your own work.  It was not so much because you were bent on copying them as it was a matter of them being so good with the tools, psychology, and convention at their disposal.

You remember at one point, telling another wannabe writer friend of your dismay at discovering all those freaking adverbs in Fitzgerald.  Steinbeck, too; surely he'd have known, because the one time you met him, he seemed as though he knew--and regretted--everything.  Ah, what he was regretting was having moved east, to New York.  But you did not see that, back then.

For the longest time, you were first reader then editor of a long-time pal, who, in spite of all the discussions about adverbs, never turned a potential adverb away.  He called you a magician in the dedication to his penultimate novel, but he was the magician; you were merely sweeping up after him.

Identity Theft and Recovery Time

A few weeks ago, you began to receive messages from former students and friends you've not seen for a while, suggesting that your email account has been hacked, and counseling an immediate change in your password.

You took to a few social networks, Twitter and Facebook, to offer thanks, then to assure all and sundry that you had not been mugged in some remote airport and needed loans to allow you to purchase tickets home.  Also, you went on to state how you would not under any circumstances recommend wrinkle-removing creams, the ingestion of garcina cambogia, or a device that would immediately telephone a security agency to report that you'd fallen in the bathtub.

You have indeed not been in any significant airport in years, much less been mugged in one.  You've become tolerant of your own wrinkles and found those of your acquaintances to impart a certain charm.  Bath tubs have been out of your life for lo these many years, your most recent venture in a bathtub in a hotel where you were intrigued by the display of bubble bath in the guest package.

All in all, your hacked email account was small potatoes compared to the horror stories of identity theft broadcast about by security firms, warning of the consequences when you become its victim.  

In some cases, thanks to methods for duplicating documents such as driver's licenses and identity cards, you could be sending an evil twin doppelganger out into the world, a person who becomes you to apply for credit, make purchases, enter agreements, join Internet dating systems, and in numerous ways, become a troll.

These past days, in which your head seemed packed with the equivalent of steel-cut oatmeal, symptom number one of a head cold, subjected to rapid-fire bursts of sneezing, for symptom number two of a cold, and for symptom number three, forced to cope with a seemingly endless post nasal drip which, if you were not careful, would slide down your throat, thereupon to take up residence in your lungs and bronchia, triggering symptom number four, spasms of chest-wracking coughing, you became aware of yet another way in which identity is pilfered.

Illness of any sort is an identity thief; it steals from you your ordinary, greet-the-new-challenge persona resident within you, turns it into the equivalent of Dr. Jekyll's vociferous and mean spirited boarder, Mr. Hyde.  You don't need emails from friends to alert you.  There is already a growing sense of time about to be lost.

Most of the illnesses of your acquaintance had some time frame suggested to you by a doctor.  Your venture with cancer, you were told, would require six weeks of your time.  "Until?"  you asked.  "Until time to consider chemotherapy and or radiation."

Six weeks, it was.  But there you were, back in class.  Based on what the surgeon had told you and your own regard for chemotherapy and radiation, those were not an issue. Lesser time frames such as colds, and influenza, were mortgages of one or two weeks, based on your past experience.  A sprain or wrench could stay with you for a week.

You are in effect not the self you chose to be, trying to evict these unwanted boarders, these squatters, from your presence.  In another sense, your identity goes missing when you are wrenched away from easy solutions to problems emerging in your writing.  

Where to go next?  How to portray it?  And sometimes, the aches and pains from, of necessity, having to reach too far, or the rebound from the frustration of thinking you have no more resources to plumb in order to find solutions.

So far, you've been fortunate.  Some things lingered longer than you had the patience for, and you found yourself obsessed by focusing on ways to bring your old self back, reclaim your identity.

The time loss from writing is, of course, another matter well beyond illness.  Even if you have not been successful in your dealing with the writing at hand, it has given you a vast sea of intangibles from which to draw when you must go in again and ask for more insight, more understanding, more empathy, more of the identity you sought when, so many years ago, you first began the journey.