Ugly, writing exercise, Natalie Goldberg, failure

Utter failure. She wanted to know what I thought ugliness was, so I told her. "Ugliness is failure." I can still taste the last time I failed, and I mean really failed.  I failed to produce the desired result. It was that simple, but not doing what I was appointed to do, was not a loss. It was the laying face down in my own crapulence, that was the failure. 

I'll talk about the money first. I had 200,000 dollars. The most money I had ever held in my entire life. The number was too big to think about, so I had the banker stack twenty rows of one hundred, one hundred-dollar bills, in front of me. After seeing my money like that I knew, I never wanted to be without money again.

Then I lost it all. Not all at once. First there was Mexico City, then Los Angeles, then Las Vegas, and finally San Francisco. That's all it took, four cities and it was all gone. In Mexico City I was mugged, in Los Angeles I was stabbed, in Las Vegas I gave a bunch away and finally in San Francisco I gripped it too tight, so it slipped through my hands. 

But like I said, that wasn't the failure. 

When the last of it was finally gone, I pulled my home phone off the wall and I sleet on the kitchen floor in a ball. My cell phone had long since stopped working and I couldn't bring myself to get on the Internet and spread my disease, my loss, to my family back home. 

I lost a week curled up on my kitchen floor, slate green linoleum. the color of my loss.