The Thread For: Stories That Go Nowhere....

[ER]

So I woke up after having this dream that I had pulled out one of my lower front teeth in a restaurant, and in my dream I was able to pull it out easily because it was a baby tooth that never fell out. (Only in the dream.)

I called my mom, like I do every morning (to me, mid-day to her) and was going to tell her about my dream, but she immediately went off on a tangent about something I had no interest in what-so-bleeding-ever, like she so often does, sometimes charmingly, occasionally tediously, and I listened and listened until I made a mistake I increasingly make of accidentally saying something "wrong" which led to her at first patiently correcting me, then when her wisdom failed to flourish in the coarse soil of my mind, she grew more and more impatient til she was in fact sort of griping at me, and she got more and more adamant, and then she started calling me Evelyn, which she normally does not, and not many people do as a rule, Clare and her dad do, my godson, Clare's face-punching mother,  that's about it, and time ticked by and I still had not gotten to tell about my scintillating tooth-pulling dream, because honestly, when a scolding Irish woman goes off chasing a rabbit, that rabbit gets chased.

I even put my foot against a wall so I could stretch my hamstrings instead of sitting and it got to be so long,  I thought, y'know, I am forty-two years old getting dressed-down by my mother who is literally on the other side of the planet, not like she could put me in time out for a day or two since it would take her that long to get over here, and I had things to do.

So I caught her mid-lilting syllable and bravely said, "Hey, I have to go."

And I hung up.

[claws]

When I was a kid (pre smartphone days) we used to wait at secluded, lonely back road places while my father and his brother went for a beer run due to blue laws. These beer runs could take up to two to three waiting hours, enough time for me and my three older sisters, my mom and our sister-in-law (who we called auntie) and her two kids, to explore nature. We usually had fixed waiting spots at a small pond or at a shallow river. My mom would pack blankets, towels, snacks and drinks and we did this usually during the summer. My dad and his brother would drive "across the border" for beer while we stayed behind with our family station wagon.
This one time we went late for a beer run so we drove a couple miles further than we usually do. We decided to wait on a dirt road next to the main road in the middle of nowhere. There was a big corn field and empty fields all the way down the road. Behind the fields was a forrest, and there was a forrest on the other side of the main road. We kids spend time playing in the corn field while mom and auntie sat on a blanket next to our car, drinking coffee out of a thermos and reading books.
After some time we ventured down the dirt road and spotted an abandoned farm house at the very end of the road. We ran back to tell mom and auntie and we all then took a walk to the house.
It was a small house with two floors that had no furniture except for a big red couch in one of the rooms on the first floor. We didn't find any personal items, no pots and pans in the kitchen, no pictures on the wall. Nothing. All windows were broken but no shards of glass anywhere. The house was kind of creepy with decaying walls and dry leaves on the floor. It was early evening and we noticed a storm approaching. The sky had turned dark blue and there was a distant, deep rolling thunder.
When the first raindrops hit we all went inside the house and we eventually sat on and around the couch as it started to pour buckets. We just sat there telling stories and whatnot for probably an hour or so. My older sister suddenly said she saw a person standing at the end of the field at the edge of the forrest, staring at the house.
My sister was known for having a colorful imagination and she loved to scare us younger kids but this time she seemed genuinely upset. We all looked through the big broken window in silence for a minute or two but saw nothing. After a while we went back to sitting down and talking but the storm was getting stronger and wind was spraying rain through the broken windows. We decided to go back to the car. As we were about to leave we heard loud repeating thuds coming from the second floor. We stood there for a moment with eyes wide open looking up at the ceiling. Somebody was obviously home. My mom said let's get the hell outta here! We pretty much ran to the car which was parked about a half mile down the road.
We got inside and locked the doors and we talked about what just happened as we were drying ourselfs with towels. After some time we even started to make jokes about the incident (just to ease the tension). When everyone was calm we got comfy with blankets as it got cold and the windows were fogging up. Auntie turned the motor on and the car's heater was on full blast. The storm was intense and the rain hitting the car's roof was so loud we had to yell otherwise you couldn't understand your own words. We felt safe in the car, despite what just happened at the old house. We eventually fell asleep.
My dad and my uncle arrived sometime after midnight. They couldn't leave sooner because of the severe weather. It was still storming as we drove home in two cars.
To this day my sister insists she saw a person (ghost?), but we could never figure out what made the noise (ghost?). It wasn't just random noise and we highly doubt it was made by some animal. It sounded like somebody was trying to stomp a hole through the ceilling. The house had no attic and no cellar and there was only one way in and out. Was it supernatural? Maybe, maybe not, but we always refer to this story as our "ghost story".

Not sure where I was going with this but there you have it.

[indianasmith]

One fine December day I was walking in the woods, taking a short cut back to the car after walking a creek for arrowheads, when I came across a cemetery in a clearing where there had not been a cemetery before . . . there was also a creepy tent with a clothesline strung in front of it, with a bunch of severed doll heads and limbs dangling from it, all painted red.  There was even a coffin lying on the ground next to one of the headstones.  Me and Philip (my hunting partner) were starting to freak out, then I realized that all the tombstones were Styrofoam; the coffin was made of black painted plywood, and there were the tracks of a tractor running through the middle of it . . . we had found the remains of someone's haunted Halloween hayride!

[ER]

Once upon a time a relative of mine was sent off to summer camp and at camp they took a field trip to a pioneer village, where an interpreter dressed as the great frontiersman Simon Kenton, talked about his life.

Simon Kenton, an early American trailblazer second only to Daniel Boone and far outranking Congressman David Crockett, might well have lived out his days as a simple farmer and died in obscurity were it not for the motivating power of good wholesome lust.

It seems when he was a young buck barely needing to shave twice a week, Simon fixed his amorous sentiments on a flirtatious young lady affianced to one of the young squires of the settlement, an all-around alpha sort who might be pictured in imagination by employing Gaston from Disney's Beauty and the Beast as a stand-in. The more the girl made sport of leading poor Simon around by the nads nose, the more he fell for her, til finally her intended heard about all this, and basically went and kicked Simon's ass from the blacksmith's shop to the edge of the Shawnee-filled forest, even rubbing his face in the dirt, right in front of Simon's lady-love.

Oh, dear, oh, dear.

Even at such a young age the undimmed spirit that would later make Simon Kenton so famous for his deeds burned bright, and the young man decided no one would get the best of him without a rematch. So Simon spent the rest of the summer working out by chopping trees and sawing them into logs, splitting them by hand and hauling the logs to town. He labored night and day and grew stronger and stronger almost by the hour, so that by the time harvest season came, Simon was transformed from a ninety-eight pound weakling to a strapping Thor-like figure before whom hardened riverboat men stepped aside when they saw him coming.

It was time for some good wholesome revenge, ladies and gentlemen.

Simon sought out the author of his ass-kicking and said those things counted as intolerable in a time and place of honor (probably a "yo momma" joke), and soon faced off in a bare-fisted scuffle with ol' Gaston....

....who again beat the sh!t out Simon Kenton.

However, while Gaston was prancing around as Simon lay beaten in the dust, Simon used that time-honored fighting move known as "walking up behind someone and thunking him over the head with a club."

Down fell Gaston, bleeding from his nostrils, and Simon's temper  quickly cooled as shouts of, "Murderer!" rang in his dread-filled ears.

Not waiting around for the sheriff, Simon Kenton high-tailed it into the woods and did not stop running for many weeks, til he looked around and realized he was in a land of rivers and towering hills, unending forests where no one had ever gone before (except the people who'd been living there for 12,000 years). Intoxicated by the sense of wonder at this new environment, and unaware Gaston had gotten up alive though with quite a headache a few minutes after Simon fled, Simon Kenton would spend the rest of his life traveling through this undiscovered country, and because of his spirit of adventure, and his unfair fighting tactics, would go down in history as one of the great pioneers of America's past.

But, friends, his tale began with lust....

[ER]

I was telling someone today as we drove past this hostage situation how much I like March. You know that old song about being a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll? Well March is a little bit winter, a little bit spring, slightly mysterious, vaguely unpredictable, and if it were a Brady girl, it'd definitely be Jan.

I think the most meandering things while police are directing traffic so SWAT teams can get by.

[Alex]

Last week marked ten years since my stalker last tried to speak to me. I did hear recently from a mutual acquaintance that her kids walked out of her life as soon as they could (hopefully they are doing well), but that she was engaged again. Hopefully, it will work out for her this time (she has been engaged a lot, but to the best of my knowledge only married once which didn't last long).

[ER]

Last night after we found a snake in the dining room (careful leaving patio doors open when it's the time of year snakes come crawling out of winter quarters under the back deck) I was watching YouTube and for some reason in my feed the very first episode of a game show from 1972 called The Joker's Wild came up and to my surprise I got into watching it, and was on the edge of the bed fascinated to see who was going to win, when they ran out of time and stopped the episode without finishing, and I hunted high and low to find the end and couldn't, and now I'll never know which contestant won!

While I was thinking about that injustice I got up and went down to the kids' bathroom and rearranged the Star Wars Dixie cups by the sink so that the first six cups are nothing but Darth Vader.

Wonder if they'll notice that?

Wonder if I should deny doing it and pretend there's deep universal meaning to that cup arrangement?

Everyone has been up since seven-something and so far nobody's noticed.

Disappointing.

[ER]

OK, I was watching NOVA today about a Viking burial in England, and this Viking uber-warrior was hacked to death by his foes, who stabbed and slashed him numerous times before finally piercing his brain with a spear, but the detail that got me was that whoever killed him chopped through his manly bits with a battle-ax, taking out two of his three vital parts down below, and so when his friends buried him, someone placed a boar's tusk at the fork of his legs so he could enter Valhalla semi-equipped. Watching that, though, all I could think of was those poor, poor shield maidens across the rainbow bridge of Asgard, getting rogered by a dude with a boar's tusk for a member. Gotta admit, that's not a good afterlife.

[lester1/2jr]

a passenger from China told me this: her parents came to visit so they went to the Sam adams brewery, which she figured was a "Boston" thing to do and her Dad likes beer. Brewery tours are big here and they have basically a whole restaurant in there. They start the tour and immediately the Dad zeroes in on one beer he likes to the exculsion of all the others they offer on the tour: original sam adams flavor ie the kind they mass produce and sell in liquor stores

[pacman000]

I set a book on my shelf. It hasn’t moved yet.

[ER]

I set a book on my shelf. It hasn’t moved yet.

Ohhhh, I LIKE that!

[Trevor]

Started to wash undies and then I went nowhere 

[ER]

There is now an Eritrean restaurant in my city. How about that? I would imagine the cuisine is similar to that of neighboring Ethiopia, but since the two nations hate each other, it might not be a good idea to suggest the comparison while actually inside the Eritrean place.

I won't be going there anytime soon, likely, though the idea of trying a type of food I’ve never had does hold some appeal, and the foods that come from about eastern Africa over to northern Indian are probably the best in the world, it’s just that the part of town it's in has lousy parking and once in 1999 when I was there a squirrel got into my car and couldn’t get back out the crack I left in the window against the hot day, and it ran all around inside my car, and this squirrel raced back and forth, back and forth, even banging herself into the glass of the back window of my Taurus over and over, and even when my friend and I opened the front door and stepped away, the squirrel kept running all around the back of the car, as far away from us as she could get, bashing into the window, really hard.

I finally said to my friend, "Okay, climb up onto the back of the car and try to scare her through the window and see if she will run out the front.

So she did, she got up here and made faces through the back window while smacking the glass with her hand and yelling, "Go! Shoo! There’s lots of juicy nuts waiting just outside this car!"

People were naturally coming out to watch this and, like flesh-eating virus, it probably would have been funny if it was happening to someone else and not me, but to have a squirrel trapped in your car squirting poo all over while climbing the upholstery with her little claws, yeah, it got old fast and I went from laughing to contemplating going and seeing if one of the stores along the road would let me borrow a broom so I could  gently guide the squirrel out by chasing her with the broom while making cat  sounds.

Finally though she did hop up onto the seat and dash out the passenger door and nearly got hit in the street but she made it across and raced up a tree with a look of horror on her face.

Good riddance.

I went into this IGA store there, now long gone along with, I think, all IGAs everywhere, and got these sanitizing wipes and Mandy and I wiped out my car, and I called my grandpa from a phone booth and said, "You know about animals. Is it safe to get in and drive and I won’t catch lung rot or anything from squirrel droppings having been blasted all over my car?”

He said, "No, you're okay."

Of course this was coming from a man who also told my cousin he was “okay” the time he fell off a pool deck and got a golf tee poked through the skin between his thumb and index finger. “Walk it off and get a band-aid,” was his advice.

So Mandy and I got in and drove off to whatever merry adventure she and I had in those glorious fin de siècle days of the waning ‘90s.

But the thing is the Eritrean food doesn’t sound good right now because I just ate this entire four-ounce pack of dark chocolate covered black walnuts that was supposed to be four servings, and the effect of that was that I am full, I am psychosomatically sugar buzzed----I know it’s a phantom sugar buzz since it only had eight total grams of sugar---(I try to keep my sugar intake under twenty-five grams a day) and the guilt over what I just did will keep me from enjoying anything I might eat for the next several days.

That is possibly a DNA-manifestation of Irish Catholicism, since deep down I do sometimes hear a message whispered in lilting tones saying, “If yer enjoyin' it, ‘tis not good fer ye.”

Honestly, it’s a wonder Irish have so many children with that sort of message ringing in their subconscious. “Yer mustn’t enjoy it too much, now.”

So maybe that’s why I am not rushing out to try Eritrean food. I might like it and, can’t have that.

Actually there’s a lie concealed somewhere in this story. Can you find it? I’ll give you ten seconds, and then reveal where it is. Ready?

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80
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Okay, the lie is that I only hear that little whispering voice “sometimes.” I hear it a lot. Why just today as I was buying organic carrot juice in Krogers, since it’s cheaper to buy than make my own these days, unreal, huh, I heard it say, “No, don’t stare at that overweight man’s pendulous breasts! That’s not nice!”  (But, dude, he had some serious hangers going on, for real. I bet if he’d taken a picture of them and put it online and men hadn’t known they belonged to a guy, they’d have enjoyed looking at them.)

One other thought. Ever been pregnant and you go to take off your socks and you look down and you’ve got those wrinkly red ring things going around your ankles, like where your socks’ve been pressing into your skin, and you think, holy pope on fire, what’s with that? I’m an athlete, I’ve always had great circulation and lymphatic drainage like Roman plumbing….

And then it hits you, oh my gosh, even before they’re born, kids abuse their own mothers!

That’s why I don’t laugh when people say this is the devil’s world, man, that’s mighty messed up.

[ER]

Ever played a game called Noppers, where you stand outside in the rain with your face turned skyward and your eyes wide open, and the first one to have a raindrop do a direct hit on her or his eye loses?

Also if a hailstone hits your eye you're penalized by being out of the game for the rest of the day, and if you're hit by lightning you're banned from playing the game for life.

You should try it.

[ER]

Tomorrow is the vernal equinox and our eleventh anniversary. I wanted to go to Oklahoma City for the day to see a museum exhibit about the classic Great Plains Spiro culture, but that idea went over like pigskin wallets in Tel Aviv.

He said, "You want to go to....Oklahoma City for our our anniversary?"

"Might be kind of fun."

"The epicenter of Tornado Alley in spring, great idea!"

Well, it was just a thought.

As it is now I don't think we're going to do anything at all, which is actually fine by me, I'm away from home too much as it is and this way we can be with our loved ones and relax and....

....and I can't write this anymore with a straight face. Our anniversary, and we're staying home? For real? Really? That's the plan?

Somebody is NOT getting lucky on the morrow.