Campfyre Stories

Ok, so I was walking to my polling place on Tuesday.  I’m walking down a two-way street and I approach a 4-way intersection with a working three-color traffic light.  If you turn right, you’re heading the right way down a one-way street.  If you turn left, you’re heading the right way down a one way street.

It’s odd enough in and of itself, I assume there are very few intersections like that anywhere in the country, but it leaves me with a burning question.

Why is there a light?

Somehow, I convinced myself that yesterday was Thursday.  I mean, I knew on and off that it wasn’t.  In fact, all the things that I normally do on Wednesday, I did, and all the Thursday things, I didn’t, but I was convinced that it was Thursday.

I even left a message for someone, "Hey, this is Fyre.  It’s about 8pm on Thursday…"

Except that it wasn’t.  And I’m sure that part of me knew it wasn’t, and yet…

But today really is!  I’m pretty sure.  Almost certain.  Jeez, I sure hope it is.

So this morning’s first waking thought was, "Damn.  Still Thursday.  NOT Friday.  Crap!"

Which means I gained an extra day, which is probably good in terms of festival-prep, but is not good in terms of wanting the week to be over.

Because…  you know…  tomorrow is Batman.

… it’s kind of a dangerous place to be, because my mind tends to wander in very strange directions.  The very worst place to be alone with my thoughts is probably in the bath because when the strange questions start running through my head, there’s nothing I can do unless I want to get out of the tub.  And, generally, I don’t.

Sometimes I remember and go and find the answer later, so, while you probably never even wondered…

The shortest polysyllabic word in the English language is probably "ai" (pron: ah-ee), which is a type of sloth.  (Word nerds take note that much of the internet lists "Io" as the shortest polysyllabic word in the English language, but as it is a proper noun, I prefer to not take that as accurate.)

This, of course, led to the follow-up question of what the longest monosyllabic word in the English language is, but there isn’t just one, there are several, including: scratched, screeched, scrunched, stretched, straights, strengths and squelched. (Word nerds, there are two ten-letter monosyllabic words in the English language, but as they are archaic, I decided that they didn’t count for my purposes.)

Not that anyone cares, but this is the sort of place my mind wanders to when it has no direction at all.

If you actually found this interesting, you’ll probably like this website, which gave me the best and easiest-to-find answers to my questions.

There is something incredibly gratifying about knowing the exact attainable thing that you want, getting it, and having it be just as good as you built it up in your head to be.

That was my grilled cheese sandwich.

So I was fooling around on Wikipedia the other day.  I started at the Muppets and in my journey I wound up passing through (in no particular order) pseudoscience, drop bears, aurora borealis, Mithridatism, and quite a few other completely unrelated things.  What made this interesting to me was that all of this stemmed from my original read of the Muppets and that every strange topic that I found myself on had been a link from the previous page.

I had linked a friend to drop bears (because I am fascinated by cryptids) and while I continued on my own wiki journey, he wound up at Star Wars, so we had radically divergent paths.  I decided that this should be a game and he helped me to define the rules.

So let’s play a game.  This is how it goes:

Everyone starts at the same page and reads about it.  Whatever you’re most interested in linking to from there, you click.  When you have made 10 clicks, come back and comment to tell me where you wound up, how long it took and how many pit stops you made.

The Rules:
Each click only counts if you either again link or end on that page (so clicking a word to define it, then clicking back does not count).  Some clicks are considered "pit stops", where you open the link in a new tab or window because you want to read it later, but it’s not part of your overall trip.  You can have no more than 3 pit stops, but only the page you opened counts.  If you link from your pit stop, it counts as continuing your journey.  The back button should be used as sparingly as possible, but is allowed in cases where there are few internal links or when you hit a dead-end.  Using the back button carries no penalty and the dead-end page doesn’t count as a click.  Portals count as a click, but they cannot be a stopping point (either to end the game, or as a pit stop).

So, to ensure that we all start at the same point, I hit "random" until I got an article that was long enough and had enough diverse links to ensure a long and fruitful journey.  The starting point is Vulgar Latin.

And, of course, feel free to steal my game and post it on your own blog.  Choose your own starting point, though.  I imagine there are only so many places one can go from Vulgar Latin…

In my mind things are different than they are on the other side of my eyes.  It’s not that I don’t believe what I see, I do, but at the same time, there’s a part of me that desperately wishes things were different.

In my mind, sometimes people break into spontaneous song and dance numbers.  In reality, I can see the unconscious choreography of large groups of people.  There is also always a song in my head that I can hear as clearly as if I were listing to the radio and a slight dance to my step.  I rein it in, though, because things like that make people uncomfortable.

In my mind, there are scripts that work.  I always know exactly what to say and I am prepared for any possible response they could offer me.  In reality, they always say the one thing that I wasn’t prepared for.

In my mind, Stephen Hawking is a superhero, and his superpower is Time Manipulation.  In reality, Stephen Hawking probably is a superhero, but since I don’t know him, I may never know what his actual power is.  Also, in my mind, Stephen Hawking is the mental equivalent of Chuck Norris’ being a badass and his viral reputation.  In reality, I don’t think enough people really know enough about Stephen Hawking for him to become a massive cult figure.

In my mind, I am a physically attractive person.  In reality, I have a great personality.  I think that in many people’s minds the two rarely co-exist in reality.  *sigh*

In my mind, I am *FABULOUS*.  In reality…  well, ok, let’s me honest here.  In reality I am pretty damn fabulous, too.  No, that’s not quite right.  In reality, I’m rather weird, extremely unconventional, tactless and fringey.  To some that translates as fabulous, to most it just winds up in the "Huh?" category.

In my mind, I am a ninja.  In reality, I am a klutz.

In my mind, this post was a whole lot cooler.  I guess that’s the problem with some *really good ideas*.

My intention this weekend was to actively do NOTHING.  Well, not nothing, I had plans to go and buy a hat on Sunday, but except for that and my two hours of listening to political pundits yell at each other on Sunday morning, I was just going to out and out ~*slack*~.

Yeah, not so much.

Because I kind of forgot that I had this wedding next weekend, which means that I have to put together their wedding gift.  I can do that tonight, though, that’s fine, I know what I’m doing and while it does take some effort, it’s not like I’m building them a birdhouse or something.  I’m also going to have to do some laundry, but that’s pretty much cake and I generally don’t stay at the laundromat while the cycles are running.

But, except for that, all I really was going to do was buy a hat.

And…  you know…  do some dishes, and try to fix the hookups on the television and clean the bathroom and take a look at the storage room for long enough to create a plan of action for when it’s actually warm enough to spend any real amount of time in there.

But, you know, outside of that stuff, all I planned to do was to buy a hat.

And I figured, well, at least all those other things are being at home and not running all over the place to do this or see this or whatever else.  Except, of course, for buying the hat.

I missed my mom’s call because I had my ringer off, but she left a voice mail about the whole hat shopping adventure.  It’s turned into a thing.  Now it’s hat shopping and going out to dinner and seeing a show.  And, yeah, I AM interested in this band that is playing and, you know, it would be nice to have dinner out with them.

So I’ll keep moving all weekend long, and culminate with a good live show and surely a good dinner, and with luck I’ll actually get a hat out of it.  But when you look at my calendar for the month of March, the only real schedule I have up there is to go to this wedding next weekend.

And to buy a hat on Sunday.

I’m forever giving people presents.  Not major purchases or even things that come with a ribbon on top, but I keep people in my head and often will find a small thing that they would appreciate or have been asking for or that I deem perfect for them.  Sometimes it’s a purchase, sometimes it’s something I make or find, sometimes it’s something to loan (though rarely, and I pretty much always loan things assuming I won’t get it back).

For example(s), with Spawn, it may be a pack of his favorite gum or a patch or sticker of a band or phrase that he’s into;  I brought in a package of Spiderman fruit snacks for a friend of mine who is a Spidey fan; I just sent out three envelopes containing little presents for friends who live far away.  I do this all the time.  Used to be that I would sent out these packages from time to time, and they would be filled with random, fun, stupid things.  I would have several boxes lying around to collect the things over a period of months and then I’d send it out to someone.  My friends call them "Fyre Packages" because there’s no other way to name them, since you really, NEVER know what will be in that box.  I simply haven’t had the time to spend putting those things together, but I think it’s time to find a couple of smallish boxes and start that process for a couple of people who, I think, could really use that sort of thing in the next couple of months - heh.

But it doesn’t have to be a huge production and, discounting holidays and birthdays (which, let’s face it, are personal holidays), I rarely spend any significant amount of money on these things.  I think it comes, in part, from my mother, who is often bringing me (and others she cares about) small tokens of appreciation/love/thoughtfulness.  Every spring (and this should happen pretty soon), my mom makes a point of bringing me daffodils because she knows that’s it’s my favorite flower and, to me, the ultimate harbinger of spring.  Until I start seeing daffodils, either in the ground or in my home, I remain convinced that winter is never going to end.

And the funny thing is, that no matter who it is who’s doing it, whether it’s me or my mom or my brothers or my kid or even one of my friends, it always starts the same way.  "I have a present for you."  And it always IS a present and it generally makes you smile, at least, and even if it doesn’t come with a ribbon on top, or have some monetary worth, it’s generally a match for the person receiving it.

You know, I don’t think there’s nearly enough of that in the world.

So…

My mom used to live in this mansion in the ghetto.  From before she moved in and while she lived there, it was always set up as a communal household.  I don’t know the full history, but originally it was something like a boarding house for mariners when they came to port.

Big old house, some 13/14 rooms with 3.5 bathrooms (one was closed up, though), rich with history, possibly haunted, roomy and always filled with activity, but…  It was also filled with mold, and kind of falling apart, and the owner or maybe the company that rented it wouldn’t make the necessary improvements.  After living there for some 10 years, mom and company all moved out.

Why am I telling you this?  Heh.

Well, apparently one of my mother’s former housemates knows a contractor who has been doing work on that house since they moved out.  (It was really so unbelievably bad that there was no possible way they could get away with renting it without serious renovations).  He was told that, despite the mold, etc, there had been a cult living (squatting?) in that house for some time.

From here, I started getting the story from various people, but it turns out that it was a schizm of the Church of the Subgenius (aka Church of Bob).  Now I had never heard of the "Church of Bob", but when my mom went online and started looking for information, she found their real name, Church of the Subgenius, which, pretty much, anyone who’s been as much involved on the internet as I am, has heard this name, even if they don’t know exactly what it means.  The Wikiality entry (Stephen Colbert’s truthiness wiki) actually puts it in much friendlier, pop-culture terms and lists it as "one of the four great centers of the internet".

But I had no idea that little pockets of actual cultists existed, let alone in my area, let alone living in my mom’s old commune house (although it’s pretty fitting, no?).  My insatiable curiosity and ultimate goal in life to Know All Things has led me to do some research and, I have to say, silly though it may be, I like what these people are preaching, especially about "legal Conspiracy marriages", which pretty much sums up how I already feel about that particular topic.

My family agreed that my father should have been a member of this church, but in all honesty, the more I read about it, the more I realize that all of the irreverent, random, insane, slackers that I know (and, per the "threat to normalcy" post, I know a LOT of them) pretty much ARE, whether they realize it or not.  Not an actual cultist, per se (I, for one, tend to not affiliate and don’t actually *worship* at all.  It’s just not in me), but a part of the underlying spirit of the whole thing.  Not on purpose, not in any kind of organized fashion, simply in ways that are compatible without needing to be defined, labeled and belonging.

So I find it fitting (weird, but fitting) that of all the cultists in the world, these are the ones that found the old Mariner’s house and decided to set up camp there, at least for a little while.  It seems like the sort of thing that continues the spirit of what that house has been for a long time.

I’m really done with winter.  My hair is done with winter, my body is done with winter, my spirit is DONE with winter.  Unfortunately, winter is still not done with me.

So last night, as we were listening to the weather forecast (for more damned snow), I mentioned to Spawn (tongue-in-cheek) that I blame the groundhog.  He looked at me like I had grown a second head.  Apparently, we had ALL been remiss in his education of US Legends and he had NO IDEA what Groundhog Day actually was.  (He has some fault in this as well for never having asked about it.)

So I explained the lore, and he thought I was loony for sharing this information with him.  Let me just say that explaining Groundhog Day to a 14 year old really makes you realize just how ridiculous a tradition this whole thing is.  His immediate question was "All the groundhogs in the world?  Or just a specific one?"  This, of course, led me to explain about the handful of "famous" groundhogs and the only actual name I know which, of course, is Punxsutawny Phil.  He nearly fell off his chair laughing at me as I stammered through the explanation that there is ACTUALLY a town called Punxsutawny, PA.  I can’t even imagine what would have happened had I been fully up on the lore and told him that Phil emerges from a place called Gobbler’s Knob. 

Frankly, it was a rather humiliating experience for me.  Has I been making it up, I wouldn’t have minded nearly so much, but to give my kid factual information on some US lore and be mocked for it  was not really something I particularly wanted to deal with.

So for all you parents out there who have failed to explain Groundhog Day to your children, I implore you, save yourself some embarrassment and tell them while they’re young.  And maybe don’t tell them about the name of the place from which Phil emerges…  ever…  especially if they’re boys.