This past weekend, with the shade trees of the San Bernardino mountains barely breaking the first scorching heat of summer, I attended a barbecue at which the creative writing faculty at CSUSB welcomed its very first class of MFA students.

There was K, who knows his Krautrock. V of the delicately devastating characters, who brought her man. She thinks he’s a writer, too, but he doesn’t. S, who left her longboard in the Jeep. E, buffeted and strengthened by decades in music (the other worst profession that provides a potentially happy life).

N. couldn’t come. She was at her desk in the property management office, trading away the first of the thousand hours she’s offered up in exchange for the chance to stay here.

I sat amongst them, watching them already joggling against and crossing wits with and learning from each other. Inevitably, story and poem ideas started spilling from their mouths. They are pitchers filled to overflowing. Tip them, and the words just come. It was inspiring and a privilege just to be there.

I think I got through twenty minutes before the paroxysm I knew was coming hit.

What are we doing to these people?

Stoking the insane belief that their (very real) talents will surely earn them a book someday, or even guarantee the survival of books.

Sometimes, I feel like one of the high priests from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cult, babbling words even I don’t understand in the hopes of raising a dead dream that existed eons before I was born and therefore can’t really be mine.

Only problem is, my dreaming THING has no cuttlefish head, no tentacles, not even any impossible geometry with which to wow an awe-less world. All it has is a voice. Sometimes, it’s my mother’s. Or my father’s. Sometimes, it’s the narrator on my old Alfred Hitchcock record (”Hello, Cecil, wait ’til Charlie comes…). Sometimes, it’s my students’. Very occasionally, it’s mine.

And all it does is tell stories. To anyone who’ll listen.

What are we doing to these people?

I, for one, am going to listen to them.

(Speaking of which– If you haven’t, yet, you should definitely check out Kay Murphy’s comments on my last post. She’s got stories about her stories to tell. They are well worth your hearing.)

(I’m in a summer daze, writing furiously, hence the sudden flights of fancy here. I promise something concrete next time.)

Committing the cardinal sin, that’s where: I let it get to me.

And the worst thing? The most inane? It was the robot that did it.

A month or so ago, I finally let just a little bit of Bunk out to play on this website. I was hoping it would make friends with a few of you. Trigger some responses. Up the conversational ante. Lure a few more of you over to play.

Instead, it brought crashing silence, and then a spam-bot, which infested the blog with virus, got it temporarily restricted on google, and ensured ongoing invisibility for the book on which I’ve pretty much staked my career. Or at least the last decade and a half of my life.

Naturally– this being a writer’s website, where even katydids are supposed by some to dream, where silence lays steadily against the pixels and characters of glenblog, and whatever walks here, walks alone– it was the robot, not the commentless post about the novel, that triggered the existential blizzard. The why-bothers (not with writing, can’t help that, but with showing, with selling, with sharing). The poor-mes (because the book deserves to be read, damn it; or, worse, because I’ve somehow convinced myself it does when it doesn’t). The I’ll-just-take-my-blog-and-go-homes.

That didn’t last long. Longer than robot-driven dark nights of soul should have, but just a few days. Then finals happened. Then news about furloughs and the very possible reality of having to reconstruct completely the other, supposedly more stable girders from which I’ve built my family’s life.

And then, of course, the new project. Of which I’m saying nothing at this point. I’ve learned my lesson.

And then the embarrassment. Not about not selling the novel yet, or anything like that. But about my little panic-attack. Because I’m 43 years old, have been at this all my life, and should know better.

Do know better.

And the whole point of this blog was to document this process, partially to keep myself sane (cue laugh track) but at least as much to provide others going through it with some company. No advice. No secret passwords to the promised land, wherever that is and whatever you’re imagining it promises. But stories for the road.

I forgot that, momentarily.

I won’t again.