Campfyre Stories

On many different occasions in my life, people have worried unnecessarily about me.  I am not the type to inflict serious harm or death on myself.  On anyone, but especially on myself.  I think I’m too optimistic a person and, frankly, I get far too much out of life to ever even begin to consider choosing death.  No matter how depressed I get, I’ve never felt any urges to conclude this life on earth.  Once, a friend of mine called me while I was taking a long, hot bath and I didn’t answer the phone.  I "hid" in the tub for hours and when I finally got out and checked my messages, there was a voice mail saying, in a panicked voice, "Please, please call me right away.  I don’t care what time it is.  I’m really worried about you and I’m concerned that you may have done something…"

Which is completely ridiculous.  Sometimes I wonder if that particular friend really knows me at all.

But I am a fairly morbid person.  I’ll admit that I have considered "ending it all", but not in the way that phrase is generally used.  I contemplate faking one’s own death far more often than I contemplate suicide.  Now, I should probably clarify that I actually mean that conceptually rather than how it pertains to me.  Well, mostly anyway.

Conceptually, I don’t think there’s much that you can think about that is actively dangerous.  When I was younger, my friends and I used to plan bank robberies.  We’d pick a "good" bank and come up with various scenarios on how we’d get away with it.  We never even considered actually carrying out any of our "plans, but it was a fun mental pass time.  As long as things remain conceptual, there’s nothing dangerous about it.

When the twin towers fell, one of my early reactions was to wonder how many people used that opportunity to disappear and just start over.  Situations like that don’t happen very often, at least not here, so it would have to be a split second decision.  Do you call your family and tell them that you’re alright, or do you walk away and let them think that you died in a horrible, chaotic, tragic situation?  I am *convinced* that some percentage of the presumed dead really just skipped town and never looked back.

This is not designed to give anyone hope.  Even if I’m right (which I am, you know I am), those people aren’t going to all of a sudden change their minds.  It would be even less fair to the people they loved to come back from the dead than to remain dead.  It’s one of those things where you have to really mean it and once you make that choice it’s made forever.

Which is why I could never make that choice.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve contemplated it.  I’m pretty sure that I could find the underworld / underground / fringey types who could provide me with papers and documentation claiming that I’m someone else.  I think that I could hide from everyone who could recognize me and since I have one of those faces that everyone seems to think they recognize, I have faith in being able to deny being who I used to be…  who they think I am.  But forever?  Never see anyone I love again?  It’s never gotten *that* bad.

But also…  it’s not even really a do-over.  Let’s say you fake your own death.  Sure, for the right price you can probably buy all the degrees you need for a career, but you still have to be able to pull it off.  All you have to work with is who you already are, the things you’ve already learned and the experience you’ve already gained.  You can’t undo the things that already happened.  And that, I think, is what people really want.

I decided something last night.

If I wind up in a wheelchair when I’m older, it will have to be a motorized one.  I’m totally going to start an old lady wheelchair gang.  We will have matching purple jackets with black embroidery that says "Hell on Wheels".  We will terrorize people with small, yappy dogs and cat call at attractive men (old and young alike).

When it’s dinnertime and we go for our Early Bird Special, the waiters will roll their eyes and draw straws to see who draws the short stick and has to put up with our cackling, incessant demands for more coffee, more cream and faster service.  Though we will tip well, we will expect personalized attention.  If we don’t get it, we will unscrew all the lids on the salt and pepper shakers.

People will see us coming and cross the street to avoid us.

If we’re feeling especially saucy and troublesome, we will wheel our chairs down the street, obstructing traffic and flipping off those who DARE to honk at us, or otherwise try to hurry us along.  We will be feared by those who have never encountered us, and assumed to be an urban legend, but we will be real.

What’s your retirement plan?

It was almost a year ago that the cat fell out the window.  This weekend I purged my bedroom (resulting in 3 full bags for Goodwill, but that’s not even related to the point).  I learned that the windows will open from the top and it *seemed* that this would be a fine compromise – having the windows open without the cat falling out of them.

Yeah…  not so much.

Because he figured out how to perch on top of the window.  He’s the only one of the three who possibly can do that, being that the twins are 20 and 25 pounds, respectively.  He, however, weighing in at under 10 pounds can, with a little determination, get up there.  And stay up there.  Until he relaxes and falls out the window.

I woke up with a start at 4am, hearing Dracula growling at the window.  He has a nemesis who is a recent addition to our neighborhood.  The Tom likes to sit in the backyard *looking* at Dracula.  Drac makes yelling, growling noises at him and, generally, Shaman and Star come closer to watch the whole thing go down.  Except this morning?  No Star.

Also, no crying or meowing, but I thought I heard the sound of the psychological trauma of a seasoned street cat chasing a stupid, frightened housecat.  So I went out back and looked, but couldn’t find the cat.  Came back in.  Looked out the window again, found the cat cowering in a corner.  Went back outside and shoved him in the bathroom window.

I would have liked to have gone back to sleep for another two hours, but the cats took it upon themselves to yell and growl and menace each other.  Apparently, now that Star smells like outside, he’s unacceptable to the other two cats.  He, on the other hand, has been traumatized (by his own consistent stupidity) and doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for the other two cats.

For me, I got my arm all kinds of torn up while attempting to pick up one of the cats and having it turn exceptionally ugly.  I haven’t been able to get back to sleep (not least because of the infernal heat!), so I just got up and started being productive and I’m listening to cats make fire truck siren noises.

The boys have a new game.  "Try to get out of the apartment."  I’m convinced that Star is going to pull the weather stripping off the door in his attempts to get out into the hallway.  As long as the door is locked, there’s nothing the cats can do, but as soon as we forget to lock the door, the cats are trying to get out into the hallway.

For the most part, they get out when I’ve stepped outside, and bolt back into the apartment when I come back in the door.  Except for last night.  I didn’t notice that Dracula had, instead, bolted in a different direction, though I saw Star run back into the apartment.  I also didn’t think much of the yowling, since these cats yell a lot.

So I didn’t realize that Drac was trapped in the hallway and, apparently, yowling at my idiot neighbor’s door.

Now, if it were me and there was a cat in the shared hallway, my first assumption would be to check with my neighbor and find out if her cat had escaped, but apparently that’s too much common sense for my neighbor.  She assumed that an alley cat had, somehow, gotten into the building.  She and her boyfriend were trying to send my poor kitty outside…  a kitty who has spent probably a grand total of 4 hours outdoors in his 8 years of life.

I heard the ado in the hallway and went out to check.  As soon as I called, Dracula came BOOKING back into the apartment, throwing himself at the door to get back in.  The poor thing was completely terrified at having been treated like a street cat who didn’t belong in the building where he lives.

He proceeded to hide for most of the rest of the night, then snuggle with me for reassurance.

Considering the sorts of shenanigans that I’ve put up with from these cats, this one is really nothing, although I can’t even begin to imagine how torn up my neighbor would have been had she actually tried to put poor Drac outside (but the thought does amuse me because I really dislike that woman so much).  The thing is, the idiot woman KNOWS that I have cats.  On what planet is the first assumption when all the doors are closed and locked, that a random alley cat *somehow* entered the building? 

I’m hoping that this will be the major shenanigans of the year for the cats, however, I’m 100% sure this will not be the last I have to deal with my neighbor’s shenanigans. 

As I stood outside in the gently gamboling snow, watching it settle into white fluffy piles, I couldn’t help but wonder (again), how, exactly, is this like a lion?

Don’t lions live on the savannah?  And laze about in the heat?

Am I missing something here?

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…