Making It Up As I Go Along #276

MONDAY...
— Fairly normal Monday. Melissa and I go for Taco salads at Wendy’s for supper.

TUESDAY...
— Slowish night at work. Melissa and I walk with the sandpiper family at break... that’s a bit unexpected.

WEDNESDAY...
— A nuts walk after work tonight. I’m going for a while with no rabbits to be seen. I think that my string of three straight walks with three rabbits per night encountered is over. And then I see one... he runs across a driveway and into the territory of another... that one chases the first and then a third jumps out from behind a bush. The three rabbits are chasing each other around the lawns and streets in front of me. Then the first one takes off ahead of me, stopping in a driveway to sit. When it looks over at me still coming, it leaps straight up in the air (about a foot) and then plops back down where it was sitting. From there, the rabbit takes off further up the road... sees me coming and then runs towards me, veering off to the side by the time it’s fifteen feet away... finally getting away. Insane! The streak does come to an end on this walk though... a fourth rabbit appears ten minutes later. So four rabbits in an hour and a half walk.

THURSDAY...
— Home with a sick day. Just feeling wiped out today with a headache. I sleep for an hour around supper time.
— Why is it, in sports, they can never say a player simply has the flu or a cold. Is it too wimpy to be said to have a cold? It’s now always “he will not play due to flu-like symptoms.” Maybe sports doctors are so bad that they can’t even be sure. Or maybe flu-like symptoms is code for “out drinking too much last night.”

FRIDAY...
— Off work again today. Still tired and with a headache. I’ve heard several people at work with similar symptoms. So a pretty quiet day around the house.

SATURDAY...
— Around the house again. Generally feeling better but fall asleep on the couch a couple of times and fall into deep, groggy sleeps when this happens.


Dream Aquariums
So what do you write about when you’re entering your fourth day of being locked up. The biggest thing that has happened to me this week is another bout of the rabbits. And I don’t want to get into that again so soon after writing about them. E-mail spam? The titles of such e-mails explaining how I can get closer to that partner that I never knew I had. Phone spam? When people call you up out of the blue and try to spin it like you’re applying to get something from them.

These are the things I’ve dealt most with since waking up on Thursday morning. I now know who’s been calling and not leaving messages on my machine. It isn’t some long lost friend... it’s Roger’s Cable trying to get me to take their phone service.

Yeah, all the world is becoming a commercial. You can watch TV and get bombarded with it, but you can also turn the TV off and it’s still there. Internet sites with advertizing along the side, top and bottom (TSN’s website is starting to take on the look of a NASCAR vehicle). E-mails, and telephone calls... all out there trying to convince me to give my money to someone else. Or, as they’ll say it... my “Hard earned money”. That’s the thing about perfect strangers who are looking for your cash, they’re convinced that you are a hard worker. In this world of people trying to get by, doing as little as possible... they’re trying to convince you that they know how hard you work. They don’t know if I live alone, if I’m married, or if I have kids... but they know I work hard.

So I’ve been sitting around getting bombarded with advertising. I have gotten away from some of this by reading... and sleeping. But when you have sickness that makes you tired with a headache most of the time, reading’s not going to go too far. So that leaves sleep.

And being sick causes some pretty wacky dreams. One day... I think it was Saturday afternoon... I dreamt that I had a fish tank once again.

Now here’s the thing. I once had a fish tank and it was supposed to make you feel all peaceful and serene. There were times that this happened... but that tank, it would knock you down! I had fish getting sick and I’d have to remove them from the population and try to treat them in a bowl. When that didn’t work... it never worked... I’d do the humane thing. I once read that to put a fish out of it’s misery, you put it in a sandwich bag of water and chuck it into the freezer. So that was me... closing the freezer door and taking a final look at flippy the neon as I knew he’d be going to a better place.

Note: No, I didn’t name any neon fish “flippy”... this is story telling. But I did freeze more than one of my poor little pets.

So back to my dream. In my dream, like in real life those years before, I was sick of maintaining the fish tank. So in that dream, I made a decision. No more changing the water... no more changing filter inserts. I wasn’t even going to feed them anymore. There were two or three little fish remaining (the rest all having gone to that big ol’ freezer in the kitchen... beats me if there’s a fish heaven) and I was going to wait them out... death would come soon enough.

But, in dream world, it’s a funny thing that happens. The fish live... and live some more. And the next thing I know, where once there were three stragglers waiting to die, now there are five... and eight... and before I know it, I have a colony of fish. An abandoned aquarium that looks like a coral reef. I’ve got fish in there that I never saw before, let alone bought. It’s like when nature takes over an abandoned industrial site. They just found their way to my aquarium.

In fact, in dream world fish tank, I even had one fish that looked very much like a sheep. Well, more than a sheep, it looked like a big piece of cauliflower with fins... but if you have a living piece of cauliflower, of course you’d say it’s a sheep fish. And of course, the sheep fish was a bottom dwelling fish, grazing on the bits of stuff between the rocks.

It got to a point when I couldn’t take my eyes off of this fish tank. I’m loving it again... it’s bringing me peace and tranquility and there’s nothing I have to do. Some fish die, but in death, they allow the others to survive. Others are born. A perfect ecosystem there in my kitchen. I’m not sure why a fish tank belongs in a kitchen... perhaps it’s the relative closeness of the freezer (just in case).

And just as I’m really getting into the aquarium, a distant noise gets closer... ever closer... a voice, loud and annoying...

I awake. Gone is the tank of life. Gone is the grazing sheep fish. I role my head to the side and see my TV blaring an infomercial. There’s some loud mouthed, bearded man... why he’s yelling I do not know. He’s not angry... he’s not far away... he does have a microphone. But yell he does. Perhaps some marketing study showed that a loud voice convinces you to make a purchase. Either way, I suddenly have a craving to get a new mega-super juicer. Because it’s obvious... all food tastes better... in juice form.