Middle Class Crisis of Confidence, Now with giggling

So a few hours ago, stretching out from last night, I was having an intense crisis of writing confidence, the kind that starts out with, "I'm never going to be able to write anything original, my writing is rambling and inspid, all of my original work sounds overdone, overblown, over in general."

Not to say that second-guessing isn't called for, or legitimate in my case. I'm still trying to formulate my Los Angeles origin story, and I keep starting it with things like, "I left in pieces," which if played right can end up being funny (as in pieces of everything I owned shoved into my car like a late 20th century montage of the Joads heading west), or angsty (emotional pieces from leaving behind the life I thought I wanted), gross (as in leaving behind body parts, but I didn't, so that's mostly just bad, and Freyishly wrong. Fucking James Frey, stealing away every non-fiction essayists ability to let the writing lead the pack, leaving the truth behind. But most of us only nudge tiny events or timelines, we don't make up things out of whole cloth and sell to the reader as truth), or pieces as in piecemeal. But still, it leads itself (languagewise) to other statements like leaving on the idea of false words and false promises, and I want wry, and I want deprecating, but I want honest more, and on top of all of it, I want a sort of prosedy, a turn of phrase that suggest momentum and abandonment and the sheer furious discomfort of traveling cross country by car in the world's wackiest caravan of me and the cat in one car, and my mom and my aunt in the other with the walky talkies (because, imagine if you will, this was 9 years ago and it was pre-cell phone for me). Whenever one of us wanted to pull over (because god forbid we organized specific stops), we had to roll down the window and hike the Walky Talking antenna out the window and wave it around because turns out they didn't actually work, but the flailing on the highway did.

And that was just the road trip.

So I'm leeching my momentum out with self-doubt, and fear, and ignoring the butt in seat rule, and it grows and spirals and yesterdays prompts didn't do more than make me panicky. Well, okay, it also gave me a visual/linguistic pun which is apparently only funny to me (and _minxy_, please forgive me for the harrasment, it's meant with love). She suggested the incorporation of a "pomegranite", and to me, the fruit, combined with the spelling error brought to mind this scene:

"It's a fruit?"

"Mmm hmm." Jackson nods and Vala smirks. "Pomegranates. They're a sign of fertility."

"They're also round and easy to carve." Jackson says absently, tracing the shape of the carving with his finger, not quite touching the stone relief.

Mitchell looks at the curve of fruit captured in the sandstone frieze, mouth twitching. "So that would be a pomegranite, then?"

Jackson is unamused, but Vala snorts. "You can wait your whole life for a pun that bad." He grins at her, cheeky and unrepentent.

Hee - sandstone? Rock? Carving? Pome -GRANITE?

It's okay, none of the Hussies thought it was funny either. (It's the whole Persephone, and pink Egyptian granite thing... still not funny? Sigh. The dangers of a classical education).

So the fruit lead to thoughts of a disheveled house after a holiday party, and that lead to thoughts of fic, and thoughts of non-fic and people making do, which lead to and from riarambles poinsettia image and maybe things aren't as dour as they look, because I feel more like writing is a possibility (as opposed to three hours ago where I couldn't even work because of the writing panic) and I can just roll my eyes at myself.