Sun., Oct. 24, 1999
"Leave me alone and let me sleep!"
- The most frequently repeated saying of Confucius
even though he first came up with it while still a mere
schoolboy
Another woolly-headed Sunday. Poor, barefoot thoughts sink into bakery fresh tar as my limbs struggle half-heartedly against the bulging sacks of ennui someone has stapled to their torsos.
My cat tears through the house like a fox on fire, a fur-emitting rebuke to my innermost inactivity.
It's not that I want to be immobile a mere week before Halloween, it's just that I must be true to a paralysis my soul seems to have eloped with in the night....
Plans. I have plans, but they seem fated to drop and roll away at the first sound of my approach.
I want to go find a front porch dummy, hurry it into the car, rush it to the hospital and demand that modern medical equipment be used to resuscitate its hollowed out pumpkin head....
I want to discover weeping cement garden gnomes in my back yard, just so I might notify the media and draw a crowd of rapt insects who believe in life after frost....
I want to hang with the bats as long as it takes to master all the intricacies of echolocation just so that I, too, might finally put to good use the beeps constantly erupting from my head....
Instead, I merely sit and and watch expressions wash over the face of my wife like ocean waves crashing on a fleshy shore, playing havoc with the lives of the microscopic creatures living there....I suspect that not all the expressions that wash over the face of my wife are hers. I suspect that her face is a sort of expressive party line she is charitably sharing with the faceless tribes of southern Numibia. That any one woman can secrete such a wide variety of rapidly changing expressions strains credulity and feminine musculature alike, and I say so. Her voice assures me that, yes, all I see is hers, but in the distance I can hear strange coins being deposited into Numibian public phones and the pent up grimaces and grins of a mysterious civilization being squeezed into
the small holes of faraway receivers
for instantaneous delivery to
my uncomprehending
eyes....Over 275,000 American households now have assets in excess of $10 million each. I am on the verge of suggesting to my wife that we go out and make friends with the members of some of these households just so they'll buy us stuff when a fur-emitting streak goes by like a fox on fire, swirling the words in my open mind....
"Money is no object," a voice on TV reveals.
"Least of all a fruit," I add.
Alas, I may as well be talking to a living will for all the good it does....I should be happy and full of life, or at least able to find the energy to write that long-planned letter to my water department asking that they send at least a little maple syrup along with all that fluoride, but I am not.
Why?
I'd shrug but I can't even find the energy for that.
After hours of asking, begging, and pleading, I finally convince my wife to shrug for me in exchange for a back rub later.
If only she knew what a poor credit risk I am today....I should be happy and full of life because it's an autumnally beautiful day, and only a week to Halloween, and those nightmares in which I'm hauled before a court in the Netherlands for crimes against humility have ended.
And because Godzilla has agreed to an out of court settlement. I promise never to impersonate him again without permission no matter how enticing the cityscape or a room's end tables may be, and I agree to share with him 1/8th of all the chocolate chip pancakes I may receive by mail or fax, and he, for his part, will call his lackeys off save for the one guy packing margarine.
In addition, he now owns the movie rights to this journal. He might even make a cameo appearance in any flick that eventually gets made if he gets to be the one to bite the head off that announcer fellow on the main page. Admittedly that fellow is looking a bit tired after all these months of just sitting there like the first-time journaller's lame attempt at html graphics he is. Still.... Besides loyalty, there's the possibility of my merely having traded one legal problem for an endless quarrel with the State of Ohio over the proper and improper way to terminate an employee....But enough. The time has come to take the pumpkin by the stem and perform mouth-to-mouth until the rescue crews get here.
If only in my dreams as I nap....
(©1999 by the frightfully non-threatening Dan Birtcher)
