Crankcase

Two bags of jelly beans, a ten-year old and a Tilt-A-Whirl.

Another home posting, and on a Sunday no less. I’m getting better at finding snippets of time to work this up at home rather than crank out something at blitzkrieg pace while on my lunch hour. There’s always a disparaging amount of time spent between writing something and actually reading it. What takes me an hour to write can be read in five minutes. It’s a wonder why we just haven’t bagged the whole concept in favor of mental telepathy.

And now I can tell you What I Wanted To Do for a New Year’s Resolution. The Discovery Health Channel was sponsoring a National Body Challenge. Show up at a Discovery Store, get weighed in and, for your tireless effort to do just this, they give you a free three-month membership to Bally’s. As it turned out, the closest store was an hour and change away, but on an up note, it was close to a college friend who just recently had her first child. I figured that the weigh-in would either be a teeming mass of the cellulite challenged or three people who happened to hear about it the night before.

I drove up Saturday morning early, hoping to hedge my bets and beat any potential crowd. I pull into the mall parking lot and find it empty. Okay, maybe the mall is closed. Nope, I walk in to find most of the stores shut down and the senior mall walkers out on their morning stroll. Killer, I think. I entered an odd side of the mall (this is not a mall I am familiar with or can very much afford to shop in) but still, there seemed to be no one around except the health walkers and me. Then I turned the corner and found the store. A line of two, maybe three hundred people snaking their way down one walkway and starting to turn back on itself on another. Okay time to bag this idea. I’m hoping to at least find a local gym to join instead.

I browsed around Border’s bookstore for a spell then went on to my friend Lil’ Britches. She was the wife’s roommate in college and also the Titania to my Bottom (heh heh, “bottom”) in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her baby, G, is only a few months old, but gives me an idea of what to expect when we get a screaming little monkey of our own. (Get? Oh yes, have. I meant “have a screaming little monkey of our own.”  Right.) LB was particularly hit hard by having a kid (not that she didn’t want one). She was just a very free spirit who went from doing what she wanted when she wanted to an at home mom with a child who wails almost on cue. Something to think about if one should come our way.

We had a long strange talk on ghosts. It started out talking about what painkillers LB took during labor and proceeded into how anesthesia in older people can potentially produce psychotic episodes (trust me, I’ve seen it happen in person). Then we went on to talking about how I saw ghosts at my wedding. Call me crazed, but I felt my grandparents watching over my wedding rehearsal (the actual wedding was so hot that day I concentrated on the eyes of my Missus to keep from collapsing, so they may have been there, too). The wildest was seeing Jesus behind a rose arbor while at my great-grandmother’s funeral back when I was 7 or 8. I know it sounded hokey, but it looked like every painting you see of The Son: long, flowing hair; long, flowing robes; an arbor with an impossibly large number of roses blooming in a size and color that Jackson and Perkins could only hope to reproduce. Every time I closed my eyes, He would appear near the top of the church rafters. I’d open my eyes to look up and see beams.

Anyone else ever have weird experiences like this, or are you going to send me to a nice room in Greystone Psych?

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/11/04 07:22 | link | comments |

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