Sunday’s Wandering Thought
It happened again last night. We were watching a Brit mystery on our television. Not the biggest one, a mammoth 65-inch critter, curved screen digital and all that, but the smaller 36-in digital flat screen that’s in the snug. Most of our living is in the snug. The corner recliner is the number one place for man, woman, and cats. Woman has number one claim on it, chasing the rest of us with sharply worded orders to “Get out.”
But that’s beside the point. The TV screen is big enough and digitally sharp. Not sharp enough for the moment as a character holds up a cell phone to read a text.
“Here we go,” my wife says. “What’s that say? I can’t see that. How am I supposed to see that? And they take it away so fast, I can’t even focus on it before it’s gone.”
She’s got a point. Kind of weird of them to use things like that. They provide us captions FOR THE HARD OF HEARING, as they nicely put it. (Yes, that IS sarcasm.) Would it be so difficult to include the text messages in the captions?
The White Paint Dream
I’d been alone in some modern office complex and was pretty happy about it. Then three dour men in gray suits with matching hats arrived and announced that they were there to help. All were white, tall, in their forties. They were going to paint. First I needed to clean the areas to be painted.
I rushed about, cleaning white bathrooms with white toilets. Although everything was already bright white, they were painting everything the same color. What was interesting was that the white walls had sharply and deeply etched swirl patterns covering the walls. I thought the walls were already clean but then was appalled to see that dry urine stained some sections. I hastened to find soap, water, and a cloth to clean it. As I did, I found more such stains. Located in such strange places, I wondered how the hell they came to be there?
As I scrambled to clean, some of the first arrivals began painting. Other men arrived to paint. Some came in and watched me cleaning, making comments about the urine stains.
Sunday’s Theme Music
Well, I did my duty. I popped the time back. I initially screwed up, though, setting it back a thousand years because it was two in the morning, I was cat tired, and had been out bringing a cat in and looking at the moon when a BIG bear ambled through the neighbor’s yard. Suddenly, getting the cat into the house wasn’t a problem. By the time the bear’s sound registered and I looked and saw the bear, the cat had looked, seen the bear, told me, “See you,” and was back at the door, ready to go in. So my mind wasn’t all in on the attention needed to set time back. A few wrong buttons were pressed. No harm, though, I caught it as soon as I stepped out of the time booth and discovered I was outside because the house didn’t exist here back then. Back into the booth I went, hissing to myself, “Oh crap oh crap oh crap,” as I saw in my mind’s memory that I’d done centuries instead of hours. Thank Dogs I only pressed the one instead of the four or nine below.
A heck of a morning. How is your day going?
Today is November 6, 2022, a Sunday. It’s 36 F and sunny outside, a real treat of a fall morning. Rain is forecast for later, when the temperature is 51 F. Then the temp will drop and the rain will turn to snow, 8 – 14 inches in some places, but not mine. Sunrise bulldozed out the darkness at 6:50 AM and the day night shift will begin changover at sunset, 4:58 PM.
In my little morning tale, the part about setting the clock back was my imagination having fun. The bear and cat part were true. I went to the door to see if Papi wanted in. He was sitting there awaiting moment but was clearly interested in something going on out there. Asking him what he was looking at, I noticed the fantastic almost full moon, which was taken advantage of the clouds’ absence to spill light everywhere. Between that moonlight and the cold but fresh night air, I was entranced and went out onto the walk to take full advantage of it. That’s when the bear made their noises and picked up and slammed down a trash can. Fascinating as this was, I thought, oh my, is that the time? Papi and I went in as the bear headed on down the road. I think the bear was really showing off for my benefit, you know?
A 1972 EOL song is in the morning mental music stream. I first heard “10538” when I was sixteen years old. A crazy song, I wasn’t sure what it was about, doing some careful listening before some radio DJ finally illuminated that the song was about an escaped prisoner. My dream wasn’t about being a prisoner, yet this was the song that ended up invading my head when I was thinking about the dream this morning. The Neurons had to drill really deeply into the memory banks to find it.
Remain positive in your attitude and keep testing negative. If you do test negative, take appropriate measures. You know what that stuff is, right? Not like the whole COVID started yesterday. Not unless you’ve been time-traveling.
Here’s the tune. Got my coffee and going outside to enjoy some sunshine and liquid gold. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 