Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
After reading the news updates yesterday, I mourned the patterns, the things we keep doing and won’t change. Haven’t we seen this show before? Assassinating leaders and promoting greater violence while claiming to be de-escalating. We’ve changed centuries; shouldn’t we change our tactics and strategy. No; they continue to fight the last war and run the last political campaign. Of course, there are some that lap it up and beg for more.
The timing was impeccable for this murder. Australia burning, glaciers melting, people fleeing wars and droughts as other nations turn refugees away, but hey, let’s de-escalate by killing others.
Out of that, I started singing Steve Winwood’s “Freedom Overspill” (1986).
Keep on talking all you want
Well you don’t waste a minute of time
Who cares, who knows what’s true
Coffee and tears the whole night through
Burning up on midnight oil
And it’s come right back on you
Freedom Overspill
Freedom Overspill
Force of habit, you could say
The way they talk you’re talking away
Who cares, who knows what’s true
Your wounded pride is burning you up
Burning up on midnight oil
And it’s come right back on you
h/t to Metrolyrics.com cuz’ cutting and pasting song lyrics is easier.
That ‘Force of habit’ line is what hooked me. Nations, like people, fall into habits, especially as leadership and thinking diminishes. Like marketing, they think, well, this worked before. Press drumbeats follow soon. We’ve seen it happen so many times already in this young century.
It takes strength and awareness to change. Does anyone out there have it?
He repeated something that his wife had told him. “I never said that,” she said before anyone else could speak.
Indignation rose. Yes, you did, he began to say, but considered, maybe he’d heard it wrong. Maybe he was mis-remembering. Or maybe she’d said it wrong. Perhaps she didn’t remember saying it, or the people that told her had told her wrong. Or maybe she’d incorrectly remembered what she’d been told and then told him wrong, but didn’t remember it.
The only way to resolve this would be record and index everything so that he could go back and know exactly what was said.
Yeah, right. Who had time for that?
He smiled. “Sorry. I guess I got it wrong.”
He had no sense of direction, she noticed, but then she observed other oddities. When he entered a room, if the door was closed on his arrival, he left it open. If the light was off, he turned it on and left it on, and if it was on, he turned it off.
As she realized these things, she also saw that he was always confused about which pull to use on the up/down blinds, lowering them when he meant to raise them, exclaiming, “I don’t know why I can’t remember which one of these to use. I’m always doing this.” Of course you are, she thought without telling him. When she asked him to look right, he looked left, and when he was told to turn right, he often began turning left. Sometimes, she heard him tell something that he’d said as something that she’d said, insisting that the false memory was true.
With these traits piling up, it didn’t surprise her to realize that he always thought that lies were the truth, and that truths were lies. It was, she decided, that he lived in a mirrored world. With that observation, she understood him much better, and could use words to get her way.
And she lived happily ever after…
Michael Seidel, writer 