Pitch dark

The old man who owned the farmhouse brewed pickles in its unfinished basement, and sometimes in the middle of the night, when I had done every last other thing I could think of doing, besides writing, I would go down there and jimmy the latch on it. I was afraid to turn on the light, and risk getting caught, so I would feel around in the pitch dark and fish the half-pickled pickles out of their barrels by touch. Then I would crouch there on the dirt floor in the dark, swigging from a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream and gnawing on the pickles the way a castaway gnaws on the bones of his deceased companions.

One night, when the temperature reached fifteen degrees below zero, I took all my clothes off and ran around outside just to see what it felt like.

I was losing my mind.

—Lev Grossman, "How Not to Become a Writer," from his blog