The house is so quiet when the boy isn’t here. It’s nice to be able to wake up and not be forced into an almost immediate conversation. I know the minds of kids click away at a million miles per hour, but why this incessant need to let the mouth flap right along with it? Is the mouth the exhaust pipe? I swear some days that the fumes from all the words will kill me.
But this morning - quiet. I drink some coffee and sit around in my underwear watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica in fast-forward. It’s too boring and slow at normal speed. Why do all the space shows suddenly seem to have blond women fighter pilots? Maybe I’m just too sporadic a viewer to really know the facts. But I tried watching Andromeda the other day, and now Battlestar Galactica, and I could have sworn for a moment there that the two shows were sharing a fighter pilot. But no, now I see that the women are completely different.
I stopped watching Andromeda right after I caught the ending of one episode where the captain has apparently thrown an old lover out into some sort of space trap, where she will remain imprisoned for a thousand years. This sounds good in theory, and even peaks my interest just a tad, but if you’re going to do something like this, you need to follow it up by saying something profound. You just don’t trap someone in a complicated set of space mirrors or whatever it was, and then walk away saying, “A thousand years should be long enough for her to get over me. Maybe.”
The last thing I need is to be sitting around watching some new space captain who thinks he’s Captain Kirk.
It sure sounds like I sit around watching the sci-fi channel all day, but I assure you, I don’t.
I have better things to do. I must get the house ready! A visitor is coming!
Other Keith flies into town on Friday. You’ve seen his name around here. He’s a real life person and not something I made up, although he would make an excellent fictional character, if I do say so myself. Can you imagine it? Friday through Tuesday I get to hang out with a real, life adult.
So what do old college roommates do when they get together? Other Keith and I like to push a couple of beds into the smallest room in the house, then throw in a television, a couch, a couple of stereos, a bunch of books, two desks, and all the clothes we own in the world. The room need be no bigger then 10 x 10 as we recreate those fond dorm room days. We sit around in bare feet and drink Dr. Pepper.
Only now it’s Diet Dr. Pepper. And when we’re together, instead of skipping class, we skip work.
We’ve both come so far!
Hurry! Clean! The boy will be here by lunchtime. Everything will grind to a halt and the house’s cleanliness rating will once again begin its unstoppable backslide.
I think I like sci-fi because starships always seem to be so spotless. Why is that? Is it because you need so little when you travel through space? Or is it just because the prop department was tired of making fake cardboard space-looking things?
America has several prop departments. I believe one is down that hall right over there. Do you see it? Yes, that’s it. Third door on the right. You can’t miss it. A big sign, right on the door, that says “China.”