May 15, 2023 0

The Bureau

Patrick felt like warmed-over crap. Aches gnawed his spine. Coffee tasted like tar in his mouth. Betrayed by coffee. How was that possible?

Squinting at the ceiling, Patrick loosened a long and heavy sigh. “God, universe, whatever, please, please, change my luck for me. I seriously need a change.”

A small person at a gray desk floated in front of him instantaneously. She was about four inches tall, seated as she was, in a pleasant black suit with a white shirt. As he gaped at her and backed away, the napping black cat arose from his desk and hurried over, ready to pounce on the newcomer.

“Control your cat,” the little pale-skinned female with short gray hair said. “I don’t want to hurt it.”

Grabbing Loki, Patrick asked, “Who the hell are you? How’d you get here?”

A little disapproving cluck came out of the little one. “Call me Hortense. I’m with luck prayer services. You prayed for a change of luck. I’m here to address your request.”

Meowing, the cat squirmed in Patrick’s arms while keeping hot green-eyed focus on the little floating agent. “I’m never heard of…what’d you call it?”

“Luck prayer services. I’m Hortense, your account manager. You asked for more luck. Unfortunately, you’re out of luck. In reviewing your account, I see that you were born with a great deal of luck. Intelligent, talented, white, male, born in the United States of good parents…minor issues with them… No genetic issues. Yes, you were lucky. Unfortunately, you’ve used it all up.”

Tapping a keyboard, she leaned into the screen. “Several car accidents while drink driving in which you escaped unhurt and without legal repercussions. Tornados. Hurricane. Earthquake. Promotions. Stock purchases. Health. You smoked cigars for ten years and had no respiratory problems when COVID-19 struck. You realize how lucky that is?”

“I…yeah, yeah.” Patrick bobbed his head. “I know, I know.”

Loki broke free and leaped for Hortense. Something caught and held the cat in mid-air.

“Told you to control that cat, sir,” Hortense snapped. “If you don’t, I will.”

“I – sorry.” Patrick took Loki and put him in another room and closed the door. Hortense and her desk followed him throughout.

Turning and encountering her in the hall made Patrick jump. “Jesus, you.” He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. It sounds like you’re telling me that my luck has run out.”

“I am, sir.”

“That doesn’t sound good for me.”

“No sir.”

“Anyway I can get more?”

“Of course.” One thin eyebrow jumped on Hortense’s tiny face. “It would take more money than you now have but you can buy more luck.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

“A deal with the Devil is highly rated.”

“Yikes. Don’t think I’m ready to do that. Isn’t there anything else?”

“You can try to create your own luck. Some people have luck with that.” Hortense chortled. “Or you can steal some.”

Loki yowled at the door and vigorously clawed it.

“Are you seriously suggesting that I steal someone else’s luck?” As he asked, Patrick amended his thinking. “Can I choose my victim?” He was thinking, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump both seemed pretty damn lucky. Or Soros. Gates. Musk.

“You can but that rarely works out. Hard for most to differentiate between good and bad luck. You might accidently pilfer their bad luck.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want that.” Patrick felt resigned, which oddly made him feel better. It was like, this wasn’t in his control. Knowing that relieved him of responsibility. Nothing he could do about it. “Is there anything else?”

“Well…yes. According to your records, you are eligible for employment.”

Patrick went still with thought. “Go on.”

“If you work for us, you can be compensated in good luck.”

“Who is us?”

Hortense smiled. “We just call ourselves The Bureau. Capital T, capital B.”

“You’re recruiting me.” Patrick suspected a setup. “So I do a job for you and The Bureau pays me in good luck.”

“Yes.”

“I assume whatever it is won’t be easy.”

“They’re normally not. But let me tell you. With your luck, if you don’t take this offer, you’ll be dead in a year.”

That’s how Patrick’s career began. Hard to believe but now he was about to start his tenth mission.

He’d need all of his hard-earned luck to stay alive.

April 26, 2023 1

January 24, 2023 0

Friday’s Theme Music

Friday. I’m ready for the weekend. Wednesday felt like Friday. So did Thursday. Now Friday is here, and Friday feels like Friday.

I ruminated about what that means, when a day feels like Friday. It feels like you’re ready to rest and have a change from your routines. Mind you, I don’t work. I set my own routines. So all this is a mind game for me. The mind is winning so far.

Yeah boy, it’s Friday, January 13, 2023. Last night’s winds were the worse of this season’s offerings. They reached sound levels where I looked out expecting to see huge animals stampeding past. I’ve been in hurricanes, typhoons, and tornados. These wind sounds didn’t achieve those levels, but they did inspire The Neurons to say that if this keeps up…

It didn’t keep up, though. After a few power short power outages, not even enough to restart the clocks, but enough that the clocks opened and closed their eyes, the winds finally tailed off in the night’s middle. Rain kept going and still is. Today’s high is 54 degrees F. We’re at 52. After peaking, we’ll going to go downhill into the lower forties. Still not bad temperatures, right? Snow was sitting on some of our surrounding mountain ridges and peaks yesterday. We can’t judge that and whether our drought is over until it’s all done in the spring, but at least rivers and cisterns are full for now.

Sunrise brought enough light through the clouds after 7:39 this morning to look around for damages and see none in my area. Hope the other areas fared as well. I’ll check it out before the sun checks out at 5:02 this evening.

Wind thoughts brought “The Zephyr Song” into the morning mental music stream today. The Red Hot Chili Peppers released it back in the new century’s early years. Lot of rhyming going on in it. It’s a mellow tune with a few harder splashes about being on a wind and connecting with others. Those are thoughts I entertained when I was a teenager, the “wouldn’t it be neat to ride a wind whenever you wanted to, go wherever you wanted, meet others and take them with you” variety of mind playing. Naturally I thought of riding last night’s wind, hurtling the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, thundering over the rivers and plains until energy is spent and a calmer place is found.

Coffee has arrived to soothe The Neurons and uplift the rest of the body. Stay positive and test negative. Worry about tomorrow the day after tomorrow and move it forward. Here is the song. Cheers

January 13, 2023 0

January 8, 2023 1

The Shimmering

When the shimmering began, he took no notice. Half an ear heard of it, a quarter of his brain gave it a few seconds of attention, but that was mostly because he was a dirty old man. He was a dirty old man, couldn’t help himself, though he tried to be woke or whatever the right expression was, so the three young women caught his attention.

They were right beside him, so young, healthy, and energetic, drinking some kind of holiday coffee drink loaded with whip cream and sipped up with straws. He could even smell whatever perfume of shampoo or lotion they wore. Their behavior kindled a universe of remembered thoughts about what being young meant. One, the brunette, a tall person with wide dark eyes, maybe endowed with some Korean heritage, gasped and said more loudly than anything said previously, “Marcus has the shimmering.”

Voices dropping, heads moving toward a center point, the conversation’s tone was a serious counterpart to their previous merriment. Such behavior just sucked him in.

“He does?” said one blonde. As she continued with rising concern, “When,” and “Who told you,” the other blonde said, “Oh my God, when did he get it?”

Their voices dropped lower. Coffee house adult contemporary rock and mild tinnitus kept him from hearing though he pushed his mind to deeper levels of concentration. Nothing came of it.

They left five minutes later, texting on phones, drinks in hand, moving in a line to the exit and out. The shimmering was such an unusual expression, hours later, at home while watching The Kominsky Method again and eating a piece of Marie Callender apple pie which he’d baked, he remembered it and asked his dog if she’d ever heard of it. Although the dog’s intelligent face perked up, she said nothing.

“Fine help you are,” he said, the expression the two shared often, especially when he thought he heard someone creeping around outside at night. The shimmering still gnawed at him like an earworm which wouldn’t let go, so he turned to his ancient laptop and brought up Google. He hated Google almost as much as Twitter and Facebook, but Google unfortunately delivered the best results.

The shimmering, he typed in, figuring that it was probably using a traditional spelling, chuckling to himself at his droll wit. The computer screen went black as soon as he pressed enter.

“What the — .” He stared at the screen. What now? Damn technology. Stupid computer. He pressed enter a few times, hoping that would stir the screen back to life, and the did alt-ctrl-delete. Ah, yes, the old three-fingered salute. Remember the BSOD, he told himself, and laughed.

Grimacing, he acknowledged, he probably needed to do a hard reboot and pray to the tech gods that the stupid machine worked. Well, it was old. He couldn’t remember when he’d bought it. Seemed like it’d been at least ten years. Could that be right?

The screen lit up as he reached for the power button. It was kind of lavender-ish and blue, but also white and almost bright as looking at the full sun on a clear day. Pulling back with a hard wince, he closed his eyes, said, “Damn,” loudly, and leaned back.

Shelby said beside him, “That is bright.”

Eyebrows jumping, he peered at the black and white dog. Did she speak or was he imagining that? “What?” he finally asked.

The dog turned her brown and amber eyes on him. “I said that it’s bright.”

He gawked at her.

“I mean the screen,” Shelby said. “At least it’s bright to me.” The dog pointed her nose at the screen. “Hey, there are words.”

“You can read?” he asked. “You can talk and you read?”

“Look,” the dog answered, backing away. “Your skin.”

“What?” He looked down in almost the same second. A gasp rode out of him. His hands were shimmering like white sequins under hot spotlights.

Then a voice from the computer said, “You have been given the shimmering.”

“What?” he replied, because his neurons had abandoned their posts and nothing made sense to him. He might even be having a stroke. He’d always feared having a stroke.

The computer said, “Initiation beginning.” The light flowed out of the screen and embraced him.

An unexpected life was about to begin.