Year: 2014

Neon Carrots

Pavowski9 Comments

 

Aaand this one brings me firmly back into the wonderful wacky territory of WTF.

Chuck’s challenge this week is a story using a color in the title.  So I went to my trusty crayon box (okay, I went to Crayola.com) and started digging.  I was initially drawn to such fancy and whimsical colors as crimson and cerulean, periwinkle and chartreuse, but for some reason, when I saw the color “Neon Carrot,” my brain grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go, like a toddler grabbing hold of my leg hair.  (What, your toddler has never grabbed onto your leg hair?  LUCKY.)

So here’s “Neon Carrots,” a tale of vindication for every child who’s ever been a little bit leery of eating his vegetables.  I tried out a bit of a different style in this one: almost fairy-taleish.  Not sure if it reads or not.  Let me know what you think.

 

Neon Carrots

Zelda poked at a carrot, imagining that it jumped a little at the prick of her fork.

Bryan lifted a forkful of carrots and revered them under the fluorescent light.  “What’s with these carrots, mom?”

Mother gave a ceremonious clearing of her throat and smiled primly at him.  “They’re the newest thing.  I saw them in the grocery store this morning, and it was as if they were begging to be eaten.  I just had to try them!”

Father winked at Bryan and stuffed a bit of pot roast into his mouth.  “She just can’t help herself, your mother.  Sees something bright and shiny and it pulls her right in.”

“Well, aren’t they something special?”  She grabbed the pot and pulled it closer; the phosphorescent goop within illuminating her face from below like a campfire storyteller’s flashlight.  The orangey-yellow glow suffused her features and lent her a slightly sickly quality.  “Neon carrots.  Isn’t science incredible?”

Bryan and Zelda shared a look of mutual misery.  Zelda pushed her plate away.  “I don’t like them.”

“You haven’t tried them, dear.”

“I don’t have to try them.  They’re disgusting.”

Father leveled a steely eye at her.  “Eat your carrots, Z.”

“What about Bryan?”

“Bryan, too.”

Bryan scowled and elbowed her under the table.  “Thanks a lot, barf-bag.”

“Eat,” said father, in a tone which brooked no further argument.

Revolted, Zelda speared a slice of carrot and brought it to her mouth, pausing to take a deep breath first.  Like most of mother’s cooking, it was overcooked and undersalted, the end result being a pasty tasteless mass in her mouth.

Mother beamed.  “You can just taste the enzymes, can’t you?  They cross-germinated these carrots with bioluminescent kelp from the deepest part of the ocean to increase their nutritional value.  The glow is just a neat side effect.  Aren’t they fun?”

Bryan chewed thoughtfully before nodding.  “They’re not bad.”

Father winked at him.  “That’s the spirit.  Zelda, what do you think?”

Zelda swallowed.  They actually weren’t all that bad.  In fact, she suddenly felt compelled to try another bite, which she did.  She narrowed her eyes and bobbed her head up and down as the earthy undertones of the root, unnoticed at first, began to burst on her tongue.  She cleaned her plate and even asked for more carrots; mother grinned knowingly at father and spooned her another heaping helping.

They didn’t have the neon carrots again for a week, but in the meantime, mother brought home luminous squash and lustrous watercress, the latest genetically modified offerings infused with deepsea kelp and released by the Kane Farmers’ Association.  The children devoured their portions each more heartily than the last, with a zeal and excitement they had never shown for their food before.  Father became suspicious; he’d never known the kids to care so much about nutrition before.  Mother was just happy they were eating their vegetables.

*****

A week passed, and one afternoon while Zelda was playing with her dolls, she looked out the window and saw Bryan digging in the backyard like a crazed dog.  She dropped her princess and ran outside.  Bryan didn’t even look at her, he just kept scrabbling at the earth with mud-crusted nails, throwing handfuls of dirt and rocks over his shoulder.  His skin was oranger than usual, but she attributed that to the clay dust hanging in the air.  “Help me dig,” he insisted.

Zelda wanted to ask, “for what,” but she realized that Bryan’s digging wasn’t so strange, and in fact she felt like digging in the ground might not be such a bad idea herself.  They worked for the better part of an hour — neither of them thought to get shovels, and the feel of the raw earth under her fingernails oddly comforted her — and in the end had dug a little trench, two feet deep and three feet across.  Wordlessly, they nodded to each other, removed their shoes, stepped into the ditch, and began to cover themselves over with dirt — first the feet, then the ankles, then the calves.  The close, damp cold of the earth felt right around her toes.  They stood there, arms flat at their sides and chins upturned toward the sun, for a full hour before Father got home from work and asked them what they were up to.

“We’re neon carrots!” Bryan called, his face shining in the fading evening sun.

“So you are, so you are,” Father laughed.  “Come on inside.  Your mom’s picked up some incandescent cauliflower to go with the lamb chops.”

*****

During his bath, Mother noticed a tiny leaf on a tinier green stem just above Bryan’s ear.  She plucked it out, assuming he’d rolled in some grass, but Bryan began to howl and thrash in pain and could not be quieted again until mother agreed to give him another helping of carrots at dinnertime.

As they sat down, Zelda brushed her hair back behind her ear, deliberately showing him the tiny sprout at the nape of her neck.  “It’ll grow back,” she whispered.

Bryan wiped his eyes and grinned at her.

*****

Some nights later, signaled perhaps by the moon or a change in the weather, they met in the yard again to dig their ditches: deeper this time and faster, their bleeding fingers seeking the depth and the quiet and the dark of the earth, their vegetated brains numb to the pain.  As they stood in the earth with just the creeping tendrils of root and branch peeking up from the tops of their heads, they smiled at each other before entombing themselves in the ground until the harvest.

The bioluminescent produce was pulled from shelves a few days later with no explanation, and the Kane Farmers’ Association vanished like a thief in the night.

Mother and Father were upset when they disappeared, but  pleasantly surprised at the newfound bounty of neon carrots sprouting in the backyard.  Soon, Mother was pregnant again, and she was positively glowing.

To the Parents of Children Gassed in Ferguson (I Am Not Sympathetic)

Pavowski3 Comments

I’ve said it before, but it is not my intention to go around starting fires using this blog.  I try to speak from a place of my own personal experience and to generalize that experience when it’s appropriate to those unlucky souls who read what I write here with any manner of regularity.

That said, there are some things going on in Ferguson that I do feel comfortable making blanket statements about.

Look, what’s going on there is a tragedy and a travesty.  I’m not here to say that justice has gone haywire or that people are overreacting — it’s a capital “B” Bad Situation there right now no matter how you slice it.  That said, what the situation calls for is NOT people across the country jumping immediately to the blind defense of one side or another.  We simply don’t know all the ins and outs and it’s impossible for us to make a judgment on what should or should not be going on there from one day to the next.  But I do know ONE thing that protesters SHOULDN’T be doing, and that’s involving their kids in the protests.

A thing that’s getting a lot of play today is that apparently some children were on the receiving end of teargas used by the police to disperse one of the protesting groups (I’m being really careful not to use the word “mob”, because, again, I’m not there and I don’t know the situation).  And let’s not split hairs: that’s bad.

But.

The subsequent headlines and outrage and villainization of the police on the back of this unfortunate eventuality is all a fraud.  You can’t be mad at the police in this case and this instance because it is not the police force’s fault the kids got gassed.  You just can’t.  Sorry.  I know the narrative is supposed to be that the police are jumping to violence and becoming downright fascist and impinging on human rights down in Ferguson.  And the truth is, maybe they are.  But that’s immaterial in the case of these kids getting gassed.  No, if you’re a parent in Ferguson and your child got gassed, that is your fault.

“But the police shouldn’t be using teargas to break up peaceful protesters!”

Maybe not.  But they have been.  They did it on the first night of protests and they’d done it again since.  What makes you think it’d be any different this time?

“But those protesters were protesting peacefully!”

Maybe they were.  But those protesters are also fully and acutely aware of just how tense the situation is out there.  They know the cops have (and I really wish there were a better metaphor) itchy trigger fingers.  They knew and they know that it can go down at any moment out there.

“But those were just children!”

Maybe so.  But a mob is a mob (again, I’m not saying it was a mob, but I’m saying that the police are treating it like a mob), and when you’re dealing with a mob, you don’t have the luxury of time to say “oh, this person is physically trying to murder me and that one’s leading a hunger strike; let me direct my limited resources at the one that matters”.

No, the onus for any child getting gassed at any of these protests is strictly on the parents.  As a parent, your job, before anything else, is to provide for the safety of your child.  Your kid should have been at home, watching terrible reruns of cartoons you’ve seen hundreds of times, or — and I know this is pretty far out there — in bed, asleep.  Instead, you brought the kid to a protest.  A protest in a city where over the past week a teenager has died, reporters have been arrested, and teargas and rubber bullets have been unleashed on protesters.

Let’s not forget, either, the lunatic selfishness and self-importance that might cause a parent to bring a child to an event like this.  I understand the compulsion, and perhaps even the fervor that makes you feel like you have to be present, that you have to be a part of what’s happening when your community is in turmoil.  Guess what?  Your first job as a parent is keeping your kid safe; you have to either accept that and sit the protest out or embrace the idea that you’re putting your child in harm’s way for your own ideology.  I might as well bring my kid to an industrial finger-slicing factory for the educational possibilities and be angry when my kid sticks his hand in a machine (as kids are wont to do) and gets his fingers lopped off.  It’s not the machine’s fault that YOU put your kid in a dangerous situation.  The machine is just doing what it does.  The police in Ferguson are just doing what they’ve done since this whole mess started.  I’m not saying it’s right; it’s not for me to decide what’s right.  But they’ve been using teargas and rubber bullets since the first night, and you brought your kid to the protest?  You should be arrested for child endangerment.

The righteous indignation over kids being the newest victims of police brutality in Ferguson is as empty as the sympathy-pit in my cold, dead heart for these idiots putting their kids in harm’s way.  News outlets posting that “violence in Ferguson has turned against children” or “children are the latest victims of police aggression” should be ashamed of themselves.  Parents raising hell and boo-hooing and calling for the officers in question to be killed or arrested can likewise go take a hike.  The police are not knowingly firing on children.  They’re firing on a “mob.”  Let’s say you have a delicious piece of cake.  It’s glorious and has just the right amount of buttercream frosting and the cake mix is just delectable; it’s so perfect that no man living could say a cross word against the cake.  You stick the cake into a brown paper bag, light the bag on fire, and ring my doorbell.  I open the door, see a burning bag, and proceed to stomp it into oblivion to extinguish the flame, ruining a perfectly good piece of cake in the process.  You don’t get to paint me as a cake-hater.  The only way you get to say the police are targeting kids is if the police broke into your house where your child was sleeping and gassed him in his bed.

And if the cops did see the kids in the crowd?  Sorry, you still don’t get to villainize them, because now you’re hiding behind the defenseless to deter the threat of violence, which is the most cowardly of cowardly war acts.

Oh, and if you did bring your kids to the protest in the hopes that you would gain more notice for yourself or your cause by involving the kids, shame on you.  Kids don’t have an agenda; kids don’t have the capacity for that stuff.  At best they think it’s some intricate field trip, at worst you’re just indoctrinating them.  And, oh yeah, if you got your kid gassed at the protest you just had to be at, you’ve only taught him to hate cops and by extension all authority figures, which I’m sure is NOT AT THE HEART OF ANY OF SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS.

Let me reiterate that I don’t think the cops are right in this.  I don’t think that they’re wrong either.  It’s not my place to make that call, but if they have received death threats and if the crowds are growing unruly, then I understand their position.  By the same token, I don’t think the protesters are right in this, but I don’t think they’re wrong either.  A member of the community is dead and the police seem to be closing ranks, so I understand their position.  What both sides need is a good solid dose of calm-down juice and probably a more forceful authoritarian force coming in from outside to chill the business out.  Maybe the National Guard can help that today.  Either way, for the love of all that’s holy, leave your kids out of this mess.  They don’t deserve to be on the receiving end of violence that you’re helping to perpetuate, no matter what you believe about this situation.

Things Writers Need — Books

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Every Thursday I write a little piece for people who are thinking of writing books or for people who have writers in their lives.  A collection of things that a writer’s life is not complete without.  To continue in my series in Things Writers Need, here are some of my thoughts on one of the most important things in any writer’s life: books.

Nobody takes up soccer because they think it’d be nifty to kick a ball around without using their hands for an hour and a half.  They take it up because they watch a game or two and think it looks like fun and they start to practice and they get decent at kicking the ball around and that’s how we get soccer teams now.

Nobody takes up stand-up comedy because they think it’d be nifty to stand in front of a crowd and ramble about whatever minutiae are going on in his or her life at the time while a bunch of strangers sip overpriced drinks or shout abuse.  No, they see other comedians on TV or on stage and they appreciate the humor they see on display and they practice telling jokes to their friends and one day they step up to an open mic and that’s how we get stand-up comedians.

Writing is maybe a little different in that I think there may be an intrinsic desire to write things down and tell stories; something encoded in our DNA that makes us want to pass tales on to the rest of our clan.  But people don’t set out to write hundreds of pages without seeing it done several times, learning the intricacy of storytelling, learning the way characters can sprout fully-formed from mere words, learning the way an otherwise rational adult can develop a really unhealthy relationship with a collection of pulverized wood and ink: taking it to bed at night, carrying it around in a purse, caressing and holding its pages, staring into its face for hours and hours and hours on end.

Any great writer was a great reader first.  You can’t run before you walk.  You can’t write before you read.  Writers learn to love writing by reading lots and lots of books, and they learn to write by reading lots and lots of high-quality books on all sorts of things.  So, a writer needs books.

Think about your favorite book.  It changed your life, or at the very least, changed the way you thought about the world, right?  If writers want to write books that can do the same for others, we have to learn from the masters, we have to imitate their work, we have to transmogrify their talent and their teaching into our own twisted wonderful creation.

Reading is the lifeblood of the writer.  In order to keep up the steady flow of words out of our brain-holes, we need a just-as-steady flow of words in the other side.  Words are weird, words are a paradox.  You can never lose a word, but you can sure as hell use one until it’s so tired it can no longer lift its own head.  They’re a renewable resource, but you can only carry so much at a time.  I can only juggle a couple of story ideas in my head before they start knocking each other out through the ears.  And sure, I can write down every idea that comes to me, but that doesn’t necessarily help me.  The idea I jot down in February because it sounds brilliant looks like a puddle of mushy dogsharknado by the time I get around to wanting to write it in June.  These ideas have an expiration date, I think; a use-by warning that causes them to decay the longer they’re left on the shelf.

So if words and story ideas can go bad like so much Aldi produce, how does one keep fresh stock on the shelves?  You go to the grocery store, naturally.  But not Aldi — their produce goes bad in just a few days.  No, you need the good stuff; you go to Publix, or the farmer’s market.  You go to books.

In reading and pondering the intricacies of the last book I read (The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde) I had no less than three ideas for new stories of my own, riffing off of elements found in Fforde’s book from genetically engineered pets to holding works of art hostage.  They might have been crap ideas, but I had them, and a lot of writing I think is in the exercise; it’s about the journey, as they say, rather than the destination.  I also rekindled a bit of my love for science fiction and the ridiculous, which I think is at the core of my contemporary writer self.  It was a welcome discovery after the detour into YA lit I’ve had over the last couple of years.  The heavy tropes and weighty themes of Dystopian Futures and Society Must Be Saved and The Chosen Ones have weighed on me and made my writing a little bleak, a little encumbered, a little melodramatic, perhaps.  (I’m talking about the Divergents, the Matcheds, the Hunger Gameses which have been so popular in recent years.  It’s good stuff, but man, it ain’t uplifting.  Pity the children being raised on this stuff!)

Now, that’s not to say there’s nothing to gain from those books.  Far from it.  No, in every book there’s something to be learned, even if all you learn is that you don’t want to write a story like the one you just read, ever.  (I’m looking at you, Wuthering Heights.)  It’s a foolish student that turns aside the tutelage of his predecessors.  Writers need books like football players need to review tape.  Like babies need mothers’ milk.  Like a hurricane needs an area of warm, high pressure air moving into an area of cool, low pressure air.

Now, every writer out there has their preferences and tendencies.  One will gravitate toward sprawling works of incredibly detailed interpersonally linked tales of fantasy, a la Game of Thrones.  Another will splash around in the deep and impenetrable waters of gritty crime and mystery stories in the vein of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  Still another will lounge in the comforting pages of a classic romance like Pride and Prejudice.  But tendencies and preferences aside, I think it’s necessary for all writers to consume all types of literature at least occasionally.

I’ll grant that attempting to read books in all genres is a perhaps insurmountable task just given the volume of what’s out there.  You could read a book a week for a year and still leave out some of the obscure genres like, oh I dunno, Interstellar Revenge Comedy Romance.  And maybe that’s a genre best left untapped (or maybe I just got an idea for a story…).  But I think it’s far too easy to stay in your own little cabin in the woods, reading books you know you’ll like before you read them, never sampling the waters in the streams and ponds that crisscross the landscape.

I think a good book is going to have lots of elements of lots of different genres and stories; a little something for everybody.  It’s an anemic adventure story if there isn’t a little bit of romance along the way.  No science fiction yarn is complete without a good solid dose of gritty down-to-earth human interest at the bottom of it.  Thrillers go amiss if there isn’t a little bit of a fantasy element in there; a bit of something that plays outside the rules of reality.  And I don’t know a single story in any genre, no matter how dark or dismal or defeatist, that wouldn’t be better off for at least a little dose of humor.  We must bring balance to the force, and if we want to bring balance, we must ourselves be balanced.

So, the writer needs a steady diet of books.  We need books that we like and books that we hate.  Great books and terrible books.  Books we can read cover-to-cover twenty times and books we can’t penetrate beyond the first chapter.  Books that uplift and books that depress.  Books that make you want to run out of your front door and start hugging people and books that make you want to nuke the planet from orbit.  We need to read it all so that we can write all of it into our own stories.  Writers are tasked with communicating the unending message of the human condition to those who will come after us; we don’t have the right to leave any of it out.  We have to read as much as we can so that we can tell our own stories as completely as possible.

If you’re a writer, you need a library card, or you need Amazon’s new book-rental service, or you need a bookstore in your neighborhood that will let you park in an armchair and read for hours at a time, or you need a friend with a crapton of books that you can borrow.  If you’re a friend of a writer, you can never go wrong by buying that friend a book.  Doesn’t matter what kind, what genre, what author; buy them a book.  But for god’s sake, don’t give them a gift card, don’t just buy something off Oprah’s Book Club or whatever… pick out a book that you like or a book that you think they’ll like or hell, just pick out a book with an interesting cover.  They’ll read it just the same, and maybe on the next thing they write, they’ll credit you with putting that book in their hands that inspired the new story.

What book has most influenced you as a writer?  As a person?  What would be your desert-island book?  If you could make one book required reading for everybody in the world, what would it be?

Finally Truly Back From Injury (I Hope)

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My first year of running saw me rack up about 500 miles in just over 8 months.  My second year saw me come this close to 1000.  I enjoyed a meteoric rise in my ability to cover distance and run at speed and naturally it left me feeling like I could accomplish just about anything.

So when I suffered a pair of crippling injuries at the beginning of this year, it was humbling.  I went from running 25 miles a week or so to being sidelined for three and four weeks at a time.  I went from a long weekend run of 10 or 12 miles on average to barely finishing a 5k.  For a guy like me who thought he was bulletproof, the injuries and my inability to bounce back from them were a blow to both my health and my ego.

I’ve tried not to think too hard about it, not to dwell and fixate and obsess over how much speed I’ve lost, how much my fitness has declined and how frustrated I’ve been.  If you’re a habitual runner like me, I need say no more — you know the pain of not running.  If you’re not, I’d liken it to having the flu for weeks on end.  You feel weary, you feel caged in, like you’re just a drain on yourself and the people around you, like you’re asleep on your feet.

But then, a few weeks ago, a turn.

I’d been intentionally taking it easy; easier than easy, really, being careful not to push too hard and set myself back; for over a month, not running more than 5 miles outside of one 10k race (which did set me back).  Then I had one run of six miles with a friend from high school and suffered no ill effects.  Then the next week I ran five to be safe, and this past weekend I ran six again for good measure.

Well, what can I say?  My feet feel healthier than they have since before my injuries.  I’m not sure what the turnaround was, but I spent a few months after my podiatrist visit in a purgatory of not having serious pain but not feeling 100% healthy either.  Last few weeks, the injured foot feels about 95% most of the time.  It’s been a long road back, and I’ve been totally scattered: one moment I’m overly optimistic, lying to myself about my recovery to make it seem like it’s been better.  Next, I’m beating myself up for pushing too hard too fast and I’m skipping a run or cutting one short because I’m scared of injury.  Now, though, I can finally say that I’m getting back to normal.

Sidenote.

For some reason I’m feeling more keenly than ever how tedious it must feel to a non-runner to read a runner’s writing about running.  I mean, I hear the words flowing out of my fingertips (more or less) and all the athlo-babble about distance and biomechanics and injuries and pacing and negative splits and I almost want to punch myself in a mouth.  Damn.  How to approach this differently?

What’s a long run?  I guess a long run is a distance that’s significantly longer than your standard run.  Say 40% or more beyond your weekly runs.  It’s the equivalent of locking the doors and unplugging the phone and turning off the computer and cranking up your music or your white noise machine or your internal monologue.  If daily runs are your morning cup of joe, the long run is a series of espresso shots, dropping one just after the high of the first fades.  The long run is the me-time that you chase but can never catch during the week.  It’s the cherry on your sundae, the finish on your cigarette, the long dark tea-time of the soul.  And I’ve been without it for MONTHS.

Well, I’m getting it back and it’s glorious.  I feel more confident about my running than I’ve felt since the year ticked over.  I feel like I’ve been pretending about getting myself back in shape all this time and now I can embrace it for real.  I feel like I’ve got something to work toward vis-a-vis pushing my distance up again, rather than spinning my wheels in a weather-delayed holding pattern as I’ve done for months.

I picked out a route that I haven’t run since December because it’s just been too far and I couldn’t trust my feet.  I didn’t just run it; I attacked it, setting a pace I’ve not set in half a year and finished, sweating and breathing hard and lurching in exhaustion up the hill to the house (living at the top of a hill SUCKS at the end of every run).  I stretched and took stock and realized that I felt physically better than I have in months.  I waited for a few hours and re-evaluated that impression: I’ve been so mental over the injury that I can’t trust myself.  I think I feel better when I don’t.  I want to feel better but I can’t.  I feel like I can’t run that much but I can.  Hours later, the evaluation held up.  A switch has been flipped, and it feels like I’m back.

I’m burning to go for 7 this weekend but I’m going to do the “smart” thing and not jump too far too fast.  I’ll play it conservative and do 6 one more week and then I’ll go for 7.  I’ve no idea what pace I’m going to aim for or what’s even within reach, but I think the distance will be there.  I think I can finally count on my body to hold up over long distance again.  

It’d be time to start thinking about my next half marathon if we weren’t so broke.

Remote Controlled Lunatic (Or, children make you insane, vol. 271)

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Being a parent means so many little changes in your life.  Big ones, too, naturally, but little ones that don’t even really trip the radar.  There’s the level of ambient noise you perceive as “normal” in your house or the world (increases the longer you have kids).  There’s a general level of cleanliness you’re willing to accept (and which deteriorates over time).  There’s the idea of being awakened in the middle of the night for things short of the house literally being in flames or an actual intruder coming to murder your face (goes from “hardly ever acceptable” to “pretty much planned and expected every night”).  And you’re aware of these things in a detached way but not so much that you actively think about them.

Then there are the things that sneak up on you and which you accept so completely and unquestioningly that it shocks you in retrospect.  For example, I am willing to believe just about anything my wife tells me that I know about or knew about.  She could lie to me and tell me that she explained the meaning of life to me in all its nuanced poetic simplicity over pancakes yesterday, and I would believe it in a heartbeat despite not actually being in possession of said knowledge, and also knowing full well that we did not have pancakes yesterday.  My mind has become a leaky sieve, and I am no longer a good judge of whether or not I have heard something before and whether I told a thing to somebody or whether I remembered to put on pants before the family came over for dinner (spoiler alert: I didn’t, and continued to prep dinner for thirty minutes in my pajamas before my wife pulled me aside to correct the situation).

All that is to say that I no longer trust myself to know what’s actually going on right in front of me, and I will latch like a facehugger onto any explanation which presents itself, whether that explanation is reasonable or not.

Case in point.

I’m driving to work the other morning.  It’s not even a discombobulated, late, running-out-the-door-with-shaving-cream-still-on-my-ear kind of morning.  I woke up, ran, showered, shaved, had breakfast, said goodbye to the wife and kids, and got into the car and drove off.  I even remembered my pants.  I turn on the radio and I’m listening to the prattle of the Bert Show as one of the DJs (is she a DJ if she doesn’t wrangle music?… whatever) professes that she can divine facts about a person’s life just by looking at their wedding registry.  You know, high-brow entertainment.  So I’m driving and not-really-listening when I hear this voice.

It’s a strange voice.  It’s too high and too stilted and the cadence is weird and I can’t make out a word of what it’s saying.  It’s not speaking a foreign language, it’s just speaking at the lower register of what’s audible.  I turn down the radio and it stops.  “Okay,” my brain thinks, “it’s just ambient noise from the studio, maybe somebody forgot to squelch a mic or wandered through the studio gossiping about their weekend.  No worry.”  And on I drive.

Then I hear it again, same weird pitch, same weird cadence, same inaudible volume.  But I hear it more distinctly now.  A voice outside the car?  I’m driving through a neighborhood so it’s possible it could have been a kid shouting.  I buy it until I look in the mirror and see no evidence of any kids waiting on buses anywhere in the vicinity.  I turn the radio off and it stops again.  Fishy.  On I drive.

It’s when I hear the alien voice for a third time that my brain just throws up its hands and says, “Okay, I give up, you’re obviously going insane and hearing voices is just a part of your life now.”  I still can’t make out the words, but the voice is insistent and deliberate under the drone of the radio.  I’ve switched stations so I know it’s not an artifact of the studio.  I’m no longer in a residential area so it can’t be somebody speaking outside the car.    Yet there it is, sounding almost like it’s coming from inside my own head.  Do I have to be concerned about hearing voices?  Does it matter if there’s a sinister voice telling me to kill people if I can’t understand what it’s saying?  Maybe it’s my subconscious whispering to me in German because I somehow subliminally understand German from a past life I had living in feudal Germany?  I turn off the radio to be alone with my thoughts and drive for a solid five minutes under the assumption that this oddball voice is just something I’m going to have to learn to live with.

Then I come up on a red light and stop, and I hear the voice again.  Without the hum of the radio and the whimper of the car’s engine, the voice is suddenly crystal clear, if still muffled and distant sounding in my head.

“Nine!  This is the number, NINE.”  *Boing, boing, boing*

And immediately my mind flashes back in time two months to the time my son brought this horribly annoying Grover “remote control” that talks to you when you push its buttons and how much I hated that toy and how happy I didn’t realize I was when he somehow didn’t have it when we got out of the car; so happy I didn’t bother to think what had happened to it.  Obviously it slipped from his hand and slithered across the cheeto- and cheerio-crusted floor and found its way up under the driver’s seat and wedged itself in amongst the discarded coke cans and the seat’s guide rails and waited, WAITED for me to forget all about it so that it could one day — THIS DAY — begin using the momentum of the car to fling itself against a screw, which would depress the number “9” button, so that it could prattle its inane message that “THIS IS THE NUMBER NINE” into my subconscious under the guise of being radio interference.

Look, the toy is not sentient, okay?  I know that.  I HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT.  This story is not about the toy, it’s about the mind of an adult turning to mush after two years of looking after a tiny human.  It’s about the fact that it seemed — and I am not exaggerating in the least here, though I am wont to do so — more reasonable to me that I had actually gone GIBBERING INSANE on my ride into work than that a perfectly innocuous toy might have been triggered in the backseat and started singing about the number nine.  In other words, simple problem-solving strategies and common sense filters completely failed me in that moment.

Why have they failed me?  Because there is no simple problem solving strategy, and there is no such thing as common sense when you have a toddler.  I found a stuffed animal crammed into one of our living room lamps the other night.  I don’t even know how the kid was able to reach high enough to get the thing in there, or how my wife and I failed to notice it lurking, bright orange and horribly silhouetted, against the lampshade for the weeks it was up there (judging from the healthy layer of dust).  I had to tell my kid not to drink bathwater out of his little pitcher thingy not thirty seconds after he had nearly drowned himself in the tub DRINKING BATHWATER OUT OF THE LITTLE PITCHER THINGY.  The phrase, “You can’t have any smarty-candies because you didn’t make a poop” actually came out of my mouth.  I’ve cleaned MUSTARD off of the TELEVISION.  And that was all just in the last two days.

I don’t want to say that the kid(s) made me crazy.  They didn’t.  They’re only tiny little humans.  What they’ve done is eroded my mind and made me into something like a child again myself.  Higher-level thinking goes out the window when you’re a parent.  You start believing in fantastical, ridiculous sharknado because you forget to care about whether it makes sense or not.

Did I give the impression that all this was a bad thing?  I’m not sure that it is.