It’s one of those days where by 1:00 p.m. I need a nap. Behind on work again, my eyes are heavy, and I’ve just exhausted my recorded supply of the television show Ed, the only show I’d decided to watch this summer, and which, of course, I’ve just today realized has been taken out of TNT’s lineup.
I’m behind on my house payments and my eyes are not blinking correctly. I think they’re moving too slow or something. I can’t quite put my finger on the problem, which isn’t saying that I’m trying to poke at my eyes.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my secrets are, so that I can get them out of me. I don’t want to go broke with secrets inside of me, and think that maybe these two things are tied in with the eye blinking trouble. All this pressure, bunching up inside my head. For the longest time I thought the trouble was ideas. That ideas caused headaches and slow blinking. Ideas are the culprits, I would tell people. Those crazy ideas. Lose them and the trouble will go away.
It makes no sense to take Ed off of television and replace it with two back to back episodes of Becker. A one hour show makes more sense and is surely less work then two, half an hour shows. Plus I don’t like Becker. I can’t watch sixty minutes of grumpy sarcasm coming out of someone with that large of head.
I have similar reasons for not watching the news.
Someone asked me what happened to the opossum from the other day. Same thing that happens to any opossum who gets chewed on by dogs and thunked in the head with a crowbar, I guess. A day in the trash in an open topped cardboard box to keep it away from the dogs, and then a simple burial somewhere out back. Twelve acres. Lots of space. More room then I’ll ever need because honestly, I hate hitting things on the head. I know how my own head feels. I wouldn’t want someone taking a swing at me with a crowbar, although if it comes down to it, being buried out back wouldn’t be so bad. It’s peaceful around here, mostly, except around July 4th when the neighbors go crazy, and around the first of each month, when the house payment is due. But other then that, life’s a breeze, or at least it will be, in twenty-nine and a half years.
I’ll be 73 years old. I will have self-published three books and still in desperate need of some exercise. I will continue to go out for coffee, and will think that the baristas all look like little girls. When I look at them to place my order my dry as a bone eyes will still blink slowly. I’m sure I will have lost much of my sight by then, as well as my hair.
I still won’t watch the news, and most likely will have no concept that a show called Ed even existed at one time. And somewhere out in the back field, I know I will have long ago buried the two dogs and two cats that now share my life. There is no getting around it.
Did you know that P.T. Barnum had his obituary printed in the papers two weeks before his actual death so that he could savor the words?
I’ve never been that good at planning ahead.