Oven Burns On My Zeitgeist

Today, of course, is our nation’s observance/celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life. Since many businesses, most governmental facilities and my own employer have given their workers the day off, I am currently dicking around on the clacker, unsuccessfully pursuing a worthy use of my time. Although this may not come as news to anyone who’s read my work more than once, I feel it bears repeating: I tend to get side-tracked rather easily.

I’m not wired like most people, I don’t think. At this point, I could give you any number of self-effacing witticisms to illustrate the point, such as His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top or His deck is missing a couple of face cards, and who could forget the immortal He’s two members short of a quorum (sorry, it’s the only political example I can come up with on short notice). However, the amperage of my circuitry’s load-bearing capabilities doesn’t effectively relate my cognitive problems as well as the arrangement of said pathways. I simply contain too many dead-ends where ideas either die or flop over onto other already-overloaded ideas, producing gibberish, cross-contamination of thought or both.

To wit, I give you some opening lines of stories I wrote:

“So, the family and I sat at our Christmas dinner table, Mother reading correspondence from family members not able to attend, and in between soup and salad courses, recounting Aunt Clara’s prolapsed uterus and resultant emergency hysterectomy.”

“I’ve never liked being born on Christmas. Frankly, it’s pretty tough to get any attention when you’re competing with the Savior of the World, know what I mean? And how would you like to spend the better part of your birthday in church, for God’s sake?”

“Thinking all was lost I closed my eyes. Lost for days in a veritable plantation of ennui, the lush overgrowth of tedium threatening to choke me, with no breeze of inspiration to cool me, I made my peace with the Muses and prepared for the end.”

“Nurse’s Aide Bomidgie Hatamagunda lovingly slid her ham hock hand under the doctor’s face, lifting it from the desk, while the other hand gently patted his cheek.”

“The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, should be repealed.”

No, there can be no doubt, I just ain’t right, somehow. But, as long as I can afford the cost of High-Speed DSL and electricity to make it operate, I intend to continue confounding you with… well, with whatever my prose might be called—unless, of course, someone has me committed. That might set me back a little, even if it did offer some psychiatrists a worthy challenge.

I'm not going away... deal with it.