Should You Hump On Hump Day?

I like to believe I was captured by pirates and sold to slavers in the land of “Holy fuck, IhatebeingthisbusybecauseIcan’tseestraight.”

And I like to believe the boat you see in the picture above is going to be the one I use when I make my escape.

Heck I like to think that picture is from when I land on the island where the wild things are because if you give me the chance I can be like Max.

I can be the king of the wild things and I throw a really good wild rumpus.

Signs & Serendipity

I hate to say I wasn’t really captured by pirates but if I was I would hope to be like the Man In Black and to have stalwart companions like Inigo Montoya and Fezzik.

Then I could decide whether I wanted to engage in a classic battle of wits or sheer power but since none of that is real I shall have to tell you about signs and serendipity.

In the midst of the work day in which I am running like crazy from place to place I stumbled across three cars with Texas license plates.

You could call it coincidence and say it is not unusual in the City of Angels to see such a thing or you could say I was looking at the sky asking for a guardian angel to give me a sign or better yet, to drop a bag of a five or six million bucks where I could find it.

Instead of the cash I got the sign after which I promptly thanked the aforementioned angel and resubmitted my request for a significant influx in cash.

Remember, if you don’t ask you don’t get or something like that.

*****

Speaking of which I came across a post called And The Rockets’ Red Glare and remembered what happened when my children asked me not to sell our house and their reaction when I said it was already done.

That was painful and even though it was the right thing to do I hated doing it because it wasn’t on my terms, not even close.

But that is part of the fun of life, sometimes you plan to go left and it makes you go right.

The funny thing about this new job is how a small change in attitude and perspective could make it all easier for me.

It is so very similar to what I used to do. It is a bit like putting on an old pair of jeans and a ratty old t-shirt

It is a bit like putting on an old pair of jeans and a ratty old t-shirt.

If you don’t look in the mirror or stop to think about how it feels you don’t notice the tattered edges of the shirt or realize those jeans are grinding into your skin in a most undelightful way.

Sometimes that is the moment where you realize if you just dropped a couple of pounds and or did this, that and the other thing those jeans would be comfortable again.

The question is whether you are motivated to try to drop those extra pounds or if the idea of doing so is abhorrent because you recognize you are not doing it for yourself.

I don’t expect my children will ever ask me if you should hump on hump day and if they did I am sure they don’t want to hear me shout YES!

But if we were to discuss it I would tell them the past three weeks have reminded me of the importance of taking time to connect with those we care about in a way that doesn’t involve, beep, bells and whistles.

And I’d tell them I am concerned about the lack of face-to-face communication. It makes me wonder what impact the move to electronic communication will have on serendipity.

This is a work of fiction based upon a prompt from the Studio Thirty Crew. I am posting it here and there. The prompt is based upon the word Serendipity

Serendipity – Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for.

There is a very large bruise on my left arm. It is not camouflaged with makeup or masked by my shirt but open and available for viewing by all who stumble upon it. I mention this because it is kind of psychedelic looking and when I think of serendipity I think of the sixties.

I am almost a child of the sixties but not quite. Born just prior to the moon landing and Woodstock I am able to say that I saw the very last part of that decade but truth is that I don’t remember it from life experience but from pictures.

The seventies are a different story. I remember them quite well. The movies, the music, sights and sounds all are encased in that cavernous hall between my ears. Echoes of the past and hints of the future swirl back and forth in a timeless dance.

But even though I remember those days well the memories are those of a child. I remember wanting to be The Fonz and wondering if being in high school meant having to be a Sweathog. It was cool to tell my friends “up your nose with a rubber hose” or to say that they looked like Horshack.

It was a bit weird to see Vinnie Barbarino dancing in Saturday Night Fever but then again we still ran around yelling “Dy-No-Mite” like J.J. Walker so what did we know.

VANS were cool to wear but I never did own a pair. They didn’t make them in sizes that I could fit into. The pizza joints we used to hit all had sawdust on the floor and many had Pong. Pong was great as was Space Invaders.

In between and intermixed with this are memories of the Bicentennial, America turned 200 years old. We talked about it a lot during school and boy did we get excited when we got one of those Bicentennial quarters- they were cool.

It was a different world, a different time and a different place. I loved it when daylight savings time began. Never worried about a lost hour of sleep because I was too busy celebrating the extra hours of daylight that my friends and I had for playing after school. It just meant more time to ride our bikes or play baseball.

I never thought for one moment somewhere in the middle of the country there was a little girl with long dark hair, sparkling eyes and an electric smile. You can blame it on my being too young to be interested in girls or my being lost in my own world. You can blame it on either of those things or none of them. The reason why doesn’t really matter. What matters is what happened later on. What matters is what came later.

I suppose that it would be nice to pepper this post with pictures and music. It would add color and depth to it. But sometimes the silence and the intent to include imagination do more for a story. Sometimes the words that tell you about the smiling girl who loved numbers and the boy who loved words set a scene on their own.

Sometimes the silence sends its own smile and that is enough. What I know for certain is that I never expected to meet my best friend on a message board. I never expected to find her reading about GI problems.

It is not as romantic as stumbling into each other in a snowstorm or on a beach. It doesn’t hold the same excitement as my stopping a mugger from stealing a big black purse.  To be fair she might be more excited by my solving the Goldbach Conjecture or by providing Proof that 10 is a solitary number.

And that is ok with me because the connection that was created that day way back when started with our minds. All we had were words. There were no pictures to look at. We didn’t spot each other across a crowded room; meet in a bar or anything like that.

We didn’t have to worry about bad hair or bad outfits. Our words created a world and built a foundation that was far deeper and much stronger.

Sounds like Serendipity to me.

(originally published here.)

• Saved: Children