In the span of about 20 minutes, I lost my wife, my best friend, and my grip on life.

It’s not identical, but this reminds me of the beginning of Drop Dead Fred. That’s, I think, the third time I’ve referenced that scene in 24 hours.

It’s all right, though I found this part the most interesting, for personal reasons:

I told Gary that he had mistaken me for a different kind of writer, for an artist. I wasn’t an artist. I’d always thought of my work as manual labor. I liked how it felt to write a good sentence, the way it feels satisfying to cut a perfect dovetail or find the most efficient way to run pipe. I thought of words as parts, and I liked how words looked when they fit together well. I didn’t believe in muses, or divine inspiration, or writer’s block, or any of the other tropes that writers use to make procrastination an affliction rather than a choice. If an electrician showed up at my house and announced that he wasn’t “feeling it,” I’d tell him to get over himself and start unspooling wire. I felt that way about writing. It was a job, and I did it as well as I could so that I could keep doing it until I didn’t have to do it anymore, when I wouldn’t.