Brainlessness and Little Pink Pills

My brain has been in creative gridlock for the past week.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to mind but the quasi-word "meh."  And it's not just when I want to write.  I picked up a pen to do some drawing and nothing showed up on the paper but lots of crosshatching (kind of looked like this:  ########).  And FORGET doing a crossword.  The last crossword I did a couple of days ago was totally illegible by the end from constantly rewriting new answers over old ones in the grid.  The pen wore through the paper in spots.

Stupid.

It's like a big mind-sucking vacuum removed the entire right lobe of my brain while I was sleeping.  Maybe it's the fumes from painting in the small, unvented areas when I redid the bathrooms.  Who the hell knows.  I just know that I need to get out of this funk.  Pronto.

All of this yammering brings me to a story about my son.  I have been pre-approved to tell this story to the general public.  And that's no small feat:

With the trees, grass and flowers in their full, glorified bloom, the boy's allergies have hit their maximum red-eyed, sniffling, wheezing, ah-choo-ing capacity.  He is so his father's son.  The other day he came home from school, by-passing track practice because his eyes were so swollen he probably would have tripped in a pothole while running and lost all of his front teeth.  Good call on that one, son.  Seeing his misery, I dosed him up on Benadryl and he disappeared into his room, saying he could get his homework done before those little pink pills kicked in.  By 6 PM he was down for the count.  He woke up a couple of hours later, came downstairs and sat speechlessly on the couch for a minute and then went back to bed, apparently no communication with other life forms needed, per his foggy little brain. 

The next morning he woke up, bright-eyed (well, about as bright-eyed as he could get after the preceding day's conjunctivitis-ish appearance) and ready to go.  Amazing what 12+ hours of sleep can do for the teen male of the species.  And that evening he told me all about the funky dreams he had while in his Benadryl-induced haze.  Seems like one dream was the stand-out.  In it, he had started a new political party, and it was backed by the fast food industry.  Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders were his advisers.  The quilt on his bed was representative of the opposition and he was wrestling it (literally).    I wish I had been awake and able to film him wrestling with his quilt in his sleep.  Good blackmail fodder.  He evidently defeated the opposition by flipping the quilt upside-down, or something.  I started to lose track (or, I'll admit it--interest) at this point during his recollection.  Anyway, pretty vivid and wild dream.  And from a kid who hates fast food because his mother scared the bejeezus out of him when he was 8-years-old by convincing him to read the book, "Chew on This."  Hasn't looked at a chicken McNugget since.

So, after all of this talk about the kaleidoscopic dreaming going on in his brain, I'm thinking:  Maybe that's what I need to spur my creativity.  Benadryl.  Go figure.  If I'm suddenly revitalized in my writing production, my crosswords are completed with no corrections and I am productively painting and drawing, you'll know I've been to the pharmacy, just a couple of rows over from the Warts & Lice (I think they've earned capitalization status) aisle.