Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

I have a lot of good things planned for next week, including pieces about an obscure cinematic ending I’ve grown to love, a punk band with delusions of grandeur, and mouth-to-snout resuscitation. For the moment, though, I’ll confess to feeling out-of-sorts and thus not up to writing anything of particular value today: I’m pretty burnt out from a couple of big endeavors. So I’ll just share something I recently revisited, Stephen King’s 22-year-old story about his struggle to resume writing after getting hit by a van. This right here is the paragraph I stopped to ponder for a while, especially the rich and weighty last line:

I had been in terrible situations before, and writing had helped me get over them—had helped me to forget myself, at least for a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, the “time has come today.” It was possible for me to disobey that voice but very difficult not to believe it.

Spoiler alert: He ended up obeying the voice.