Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.

I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling.

Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people.

A relationship could be a place to hide too.

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.

No, Mom. I said fine." "It's just your tone." Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.