Theo sits down to write a difficult letter so he pours himself a drink. Sadly, all he has is vodka, which is not a liquor he's used to. But he's willing to learn. Vodka tonics run in the family, and maybe it's time he learned why. He puts four ice cubes into a tumbler and adds one shot of vodka (Theo's mother always told him that's what people never get right about drinks, they never bother to measure the shot). He tops it off with tonic and squeezes in a bit of fresh lemon. And when he takes a sip he's even able to elevate it above the drink of a freshman girl.
Something about the screen doesn't look right. He lightens it, squints. No. He darkens it. Worse. There's a blank page in front of him that gets whiter and whiter, bigger and emptier. There aren't many black words he needs to put upon it, just the right ones, and isn't that the tricky bit. He lightens the screen and wonders how many screens he's looked at today, and how many times. His drink is going down nice and easy.
It's not right, he decides. To the desk! Theo forces open a drawer crammed chock full of papers and useless markers and receipts and old candy. There he sees his old notebook, simple, bound in black leather, filled to the one-tenth with terrible doodles and story fragments, part of it journal, part of it idealism. He goes through four pens before finding one that will have enough ink to write what he wants to write. Theo thinks that maybe he should have picked one with less ink, that it might have given him a reason to quit earlier, to say more with less. Or, at least, to say less. But that's a decision for the subconscious, he decides, and opens up the book.
The only thing worse than staring at one blank page is staring at a hundred. Theo holds before him a stack of forgotten potential. He thinks about the tree that gave his life for his creativity and it makes him finish his drink. He replaces the half-melted ice with four new cubes, measures the vodka, finishes the small tonic bottle, and squeezes in the rest of the lemon. The lemon isn't something he can taste exactly, but he can see it there, the bits and pieces of fruit-flesh suspended in his liquid courage. The lost art of letter-writing, and wouldn't it be great if he could do something about it.
The night needs music! Like he's not a man to drink much vodka he sifts through his titles to find a music of which he's not much a listener. He settles on metal, a genre of which he somehow has almost a dozen albums from five different bands. He puts one on and is immediately struck by its melodic quality, its quiet majesty, its normality. The singer unleashes some beautiful and broken line, a razor blade gargling act. Theo can't tell what the words are, but it matter. He feels good, he feels badass, and the ice in his tumbler releases a squeaky hiss that complements the music quite nicely.
Theo isn't sure why this is so hard. A letter, one letter, typed or written, doesn't matter. He thinks back to one of his favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips, in which Calvin outlines his argument for procrastination, in that the work time is more miserable but at least there's less of it. Theo thinks this must be one of those things. He looks at his empty glass. He's not fooling anyone anymore. Time to put an end to it, he thinks. Time to put it to an end.
He picks up his pen. Dear Theo...
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