Do you ever have an imaginary conversation with someone else, and their imagined responses convince you that they’re right, so you do something different than what you planned?
Yes, this includes imaginary conversations with animals.
Simplest
After all his travels and experiences around the world, and the many things he’d eaten, drank, and sampled, he realized his favorite activity was to fall asleep reading a book with a cat as his company.
Between
Between the dreams at night, and the books I read
between the remembered movies, and the songs that I recall
between the conversations I have, and those I overhear
between the places I’ve visited and the places where I want to go
Between the thoughts about the world, and hopes and despair
between the people I watch and the events I see
between the need to think and the impulse to write
between the steps on my walk and the cups of coffee
Ideas come between the seconds
and the only relief is to write like crazy
at least one more time.
Cat Day
I guess, to give it a start, it began with the cat.
The rest is backdrop. Setting. Background. This started with the cat and her kittens.
They were totally unanticipated. We were starting another football season. Done in by injuries, my team had finished second, losing in the Superbowl by two stinking points the year before.
Unfortunately, I lost to iBot. He’s the housebot. Thinking I’d be funny and play against casting, iBot has the most masculine personality among the bots. I also made him the most abrasive. So losing to him sucked. iBot isn’t a gracious winner. I guess I should say, wasn’t, since we’re talking about the past.
There were twelve of us, and the eleven bots. Our league was three divisions of four teams each. You played your division opponents twice, and each team out of the other divisions once, for an eleven-game regular season. Then we had the playoffs. Eight teams with the best records squared off.
Cat Day, as iBot officially named it, was the first day of the season. I thought I could take the Lombardi that year. We were playing by the 2030 rules. I had Ben Roethlisberger at QB (my Dad, before he was killed, used to tell me I was a big Roethlisberger fan when I was young), with Franco Harris (Grand Dad’s favorite) in the backfield, Mike Webster at Center (another of Grand Dad’s recommendations) and big Gronk at TE. I’d managed to add Alan Faneca. Wide receivers were Antonio Brown with Larry Fitzgerald in the slot. It was on defense where I’d improved, managing to add Ron Woodson, replacing Sherman, along with Troy Polamalu. I’d had enough money to get the 2010 version of Troy to go along with my 2009 version of James Harrison. I was set.
I’d settled into the Immersion Deck, opening day at Heinz under a gorgeous warm fall day. The crowd was roaring, my beer was cold, and my pizza was hot. TinBot’s Bengals, with Tom Brady under center, was my opponent. TinBot had finished last the previous season. He’d given up a lot to get Brady, although it was old Brady. I expected a good game.
They’d just placed the ball at the twenty when the alarms went off. iBot immediately roared, “Game’s starting. Shut that fucking alarm off.”
Arya said, “It’s an intruder alert. We can’t just turn it off. It must be investigated.”
“You’re fucking security,” iBot said. As Arya said, “I know who I am,” iBot finished, “Get it done, bot.”
“Game pause,” I said, as the only human, and the only one for which an intruder actually mattered. “Delay the starts until the alarm is resolved.”
While every bot except Arya cursed me, I brought up the security monitors. I figured this was a false alarm or malfunction.
“Where is it, Arya?” I said.
The interior cams caught her moving across the domescape. Drones overtook her.
“Don’t know yet, boss,” she said. She carried two weapons. The drones were armed, too. I pitied any intruders Arya might find.
The security net immediately pinpointed a breach back by a drain. That worried me. As the drones closed on the grassy place beneath a big black oak tree and hovered, their cameras picked up the cat.
“A cat,” I said.
“Yeah, we all have fucking eyes,” iBot said. “Thanks for the news report, egghead”
Protecting three kittens, the cat looked unafraid and ready to fight. The kittens looked like they were just a day or two old.
Arya arrived on the scene. She had her weapons ready. “Instructions,” she said.
“Nuke ’em,” iBot said. “The game’s waiting. Kill them and let the games begin.”
“No,” I said.
I had no need for a cat and kittens. I’m not an animal lover. I have livestock but that’s because I eat real food.
But I saw no reason to kill the cats. She looked like my first girlfriend’s cat. The girlfriend was Joy. The cat was Snuffy. Snuffy was male, though.
A cat with kittens in my sanctuary sowed a shitload of questions that required answers. Besides the breach, her presence meant something was going on outside of my fortress. Plus, being in the dome was one thing, but how had even reached it was almost as critical.
Shit. I didn’t say it, but I thought it about nine times in a row. I wasn’t going to start the football season that day. Not until I knew what the hell had happened to my security and what was going outside of my fortress.
So, see, that’s the day everything changed.
On Cat Day.
Observed
Perhaps wrongly, I’m irritated when someone becomes angry with me for not telling them something that I observed about them after someone else tells them about it, because I infer from their accusation that they tell me everything that they observe about me, and I don’t think they do.
Kindnesses
I suppose I’m not the only one with people in my life who remember every fault, often magnifying them, and hold them against you, and forget the kindnesses you did for them.
The kindnesses were in the past, and this is now, but their anger and resentment is eternal.
“Drop a dime.”
Talking with my nieces and nephews whose ages range from 18 to mid-thirties, I asked, “Do you know the expression, drop a dime?”
No. None of them knew it. They asked about it, and I explained it.
Drop me a dime and I’ll tell you what I said.
All That’s Left
Inflammation surged in her right shoulder through several days, demoralizing her. Pain afflicted her with the smallest motion, dressing, cleaning, even brushing her teeth and combing her hair. Trying to think through options, she put bread in the toaster and considered conversation with her rheumatologist. He disliked giving cortisone shots. What else was there for the agony?
The toast popped up. Flinching her shoulder at the sound, she cried out in pain and fell to the floor, where all she could do was laugh and cry. Sometimes, that’s all that’s left.
Dreams and Writing
My dreams and writing seem to be part of my creative and imagination mind system. I figure, as worlds and space has weather, so do our minds. When a high-powered dream system moves in, it always brings a strong imagination ridge, and writing levels rise.
I wish I could track it and forecast it. Imagine us having an app on our phones or computers that can bring up radar imagery of our mind systems, with some prognosticator telling us what it all means.
“You have an emotional front moving in. It’s going to settle on you for a few days beginning Monday, with Tuesday seeing the strongest activity before it begins to move back out of the area on Thursday, so watch out for those swing moods and crankiness. The front will decrease your physical energy, and increase your maudlin memories. This activity will probably call for some comfort food on Wednesday, which will wreck your diet, and a few glasses of wine or beer, but a strong will system will arrive on Friday, enabling you to get back into healthy eating routines. The ten day outlook calls for rising optimism in the following week, with some periods of intense exuberance.”
Re-affirmed
Once again, I’ve been reminded that travel brings out the best and worst in coffee. People have different ideas about what tastes good, but they’re also part of geographic trends. “Isn’t that good coffee?” they ask, handing you some swill.
Which challenges politeness. I always err toward gratefulness. Coffee’s aroma helps ground me and restores my balance, to give nothing away about what the caffeine does to stoke my will to live. “Yes, yes, it’s very good coffee,” I reply. If pressed, I’ll mention, “It’s not quite what I would usually drink, but this is delicious. Thank you.”
Unless, of course, my taste buds are so offended that they’re lobbying my brain to spit it out. Then I swallow the coffee and say, “Mm mmm,” and complain privately later.
Some of that hotel and aero-plane stuff really pissed off my taste buds, though. I was afraid they were going to stop speaking to me. But then, they were given pie, and they were happy.
Michael Seidel, writer 