Madness of King George

I had this friend who used to buy the little brown vials of cassette head cleaner at a local music shop. He'd sit around in the park near my house and sniff from the vial. When you asked him what he was doing, he'd take a long sniff and as he was geeking he'd say, his eyes bulging and watery:

"Madness of King George, man. Madness of King George."

For awhile I wondered if he meant that the Madness was the actual contents of the vial, or that the state of mind post-inhalation was the Madness. Then he got me sniffing and I understood that the two were inseparable. The madness came up from the bottle and into your brain, where it danced in a whirl of flashing light before escaping, genie-like, back into the vial. I was left with a melancholy that seemed to have both its origin and resolution in that little brown fuel-smelling bottle with the black threaded cap.

Writing reminds me that childhood Madness. A first draft is always the Madness. There's that brief moment during composition when all is right with the world and I'm dancing/soaring across the page. That sensation crests and is immediately followed by a creeping terror about the QUALITY, what the words actually represent in the cold and unforgiving world of men. Did it translate? Did I carry it back with me or was it hopelessly degraded by the lossy transfer from muse to brain to keyboard? This fear points me back to the story. Which turns me back to the story. Which points me back to the story. What was the story? It's lost, and not just the story but the whole tiny perfect universe in which the story was set and played itself out, that's gone too, destroyed by my bungling. So I pick up the keyboard and begin again, chasing the madness anew.