Haifloof #56
Again
Remembering the past doesn’t do much good.
That’s what they tell me. The past is dead. Water under the bridge.
But we still spend a lot of time there, arguing about what happened in that particular moment (ah yes, I remember it well), trying to pick out the jigsaw pieces of memory that shows how we got here. (You’d think that weird shape would be easy to find, but the pieces are harder to place than you would have believed.)
Remembering the past can be entertaining. Like, remember how your football team used to win? Remember how skinny and good-looking you used to be? Thank god for photos, or no one would ever believe it, right?
Then sometimes, you pause, glancing up to see yourself coming in through a door in the future, then hold your breath as you look back to see who you were and squint at your self-image to know who you now are.
Then the present — which was the future and has now become the past — crowds in with needs about what you were going or where you were doing — oh, look how mixed up I am! — and then rights your direction until memory calls you away again.
Daydream
Things that are dark in flavor appeal to me. I like dark meat, dark chocolate, dark red wine and port, and dark beers like port and stout. I try – and often fail – to keep an open path to my taste buds. That means sampling offerings that don’t appeal to me based on familiarity and comfort. But I’m such a creature of ruts and routines that varying my choices becomes a challenging exercise.
Daydream is part of that.
Daydream is a Noble Coffee dark blend. As dark as an Italian roast in appearance, it’s not as sharp and bitter as an Italian or a French roast. Its flavor is smooth and fresh to my taste buds, toying me with mild nuttiness.
I do try others at Noble. Each day, they offer a blended dark and a unique, single origin that’s a lighter roast. True to form, the light roasts are revealed as winy and bitter to me. Some, though, have a terrific grapefruit juiciness, a taste that my taste buds like to have in IPAs, red blends, and Pinot Noirs.
Ultimately, it’s a world of choices out there, a distant shout from those early days at work, sipping Maxwell House re-heated in the microwave.
Got my brew, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
St. Seata
Today, I applaud St. Seata.
Like St. Asphalta, St. Seata was originally a human who became a saint who attained a godlike presence by fulfilling others’ needs as expressed through prayer. St. Asphalta was all about cars, transportation, and traffic; you appeal to St. Seata for sitting issues. Sometimes, in mass transportation, such as trains and commercial airlines, St. Seata and St. Asphalta work together to address people’s prayers.
St. Seata’s origins stretch back into the caves of antiquity and are known through ancient cave paintings discovered in Europe. One of the first human cave dwellers, others often came to St. Seata’s cave and asked, “Hey, can you fit one more in there?” St. Seata always found a way to oblige.
As with many of the ancients, St. Seata fell out of favor for a period as organized religions and wealth dominated the seating scene. He eventually made a comeback via as major disasters like the great fires of London and Chicago, or wildfires, typhoons, hurricanes, and earthquakes that took down populated areas. As space and safety became scarce, people found themselves appealing to find a place to sit.
Entertainment has fortified St. Seata’s presence. People looking for tickets to events such as soccer and football games, the Olympics, music concerts like the Beatles, etc., draw him forward to help them with their pleas for seats, too. St. Seata tries to help them all.
My prayer to St. Seata was for a much less dire situation. Sunday morning, and I was late to the coffee shop. Spotting the full parking, I worried about getting a seat where I could sit with my coffee, plug in the ‘puter, and do my writing thang.
St. Seata obliged with my second favorite space. Thank you, St. Seata.
Saturday’s Bumper Sticker
In use: “Calling her friends and their friends, they quickly organized a sip celebrating wine, cheese, chocolate, and Friday.”
Her Smile
It began in her eyes and radiated down through her cheeks, touching her lips, becoming an aura as bright as sunlight on a clear winter day. Then the dark chocolate entered her mouth, and the smile grew impossibly sweeter.
Friday’s Bumper Sticker
In use: “A tangle of muses are wrestling in my mind today.”
The Quest
Like many, I awoke this morning and began pondering the eternal questions, like, is my head getting smaller?
I wasn’t being facetious. My new Tilley hat had arrived. When I put it on, I discovered it was much larger than my other hat. I confirmed the other was a seven and a half, so the two hats were the same size.* Ergo, my head must be shrinking.
Walking about with my oversized hat on, I entertained the other questions that often plague modern humans.
1. Am I gaining weight or are my pants shrinking?
2. Are my pants getting longer, or am I getting shorter?
3. Is it possible for me to be both gaining weight and getting shorter?
4. Can my pant legs be getting longer while my pants waist is shrinking?
5. If something really had 1/4 the fat of the regular stuff, can I really eat four times as much?
6. How much beer can a beer drinker drink if a beer drinker only drank beer?
These are serious questions. The one about my shrinking head especially worries me. I can see myself as a man walking around without a head. People would probably soon start head-shaming me, shouting, “Hey, there’s little head,” whenever I pass.
There’s family precedence. My mother, who was much taller than me when I was a child, now seems to be about the size of a garden gnome. She appears to be shrinking more in every dimension every time that I see her. I figure that soon, we’ll be able to hear her, but not see her, unless she stands at the right angle and in the right light. It’s like, “Okay, I see her shadow. Let me just trace that back to her.”
Alas, like others, I found no easy answers to these questions. That’s probably why they plague us.
The quest goes on.
*Editing note: Yes, I know that not all sizes are equal sizes during the modern industrial age. Most people must try on several sets of garments or shoes of the same size before finding one that fits right. Hence, there was one shortcoming to the Tilley replacement hat process: it’s predicated on the idea that all of their hats are the same size.
Michael Seidel, writer 