Phantom Word Pain

I came across an old notebook of mine full of interesting things that I'd forgotten about.

My wife had a client who was a lightbulb stealer. He only stole the one lightbulb. This on a page where I was brainstorming ideas for a children's story about shadows. "When night comes, we have to stand together to make dark."

I wrote of a performance/conceptual art project for graffiti artists where they would roam the city creating shadows for things, spraying the ground with paint marking their imagined shadows.

I ended up writing a story about "Aha, the Lightbulb Stealer," though it didn't really work. I would like to one day return to the ideas behind the story and rewrite it.

I also discovered the term I was looking for for years. Jenny Haniver. More on that later, though the image above is of a Jenny Haniver.

Elsewhere, I wrote about phantom word pain. Perhaps all of this is phantom story pain, where one has the sensation of having a story -- it feels real, it nags at one the way a real story does -- but it isn't actually there.