Some Days Nuthin’ Fits …
— But keep the shape of your smile!
Even when you don’t go anywhere or do anything it’s still possible to have a lousy day. Living on a seaside peninsular didn’t help much with today’s day. It’s been full of Hurricane Ida driblets. No wind, but phased in spits and dribbles of rain all of which helped to steal the sunshine.
The day began from last night after I took my heart medicine too late. What got me were the fluid-draining pills as they kept me up most of the night. Every time I almost fell asleep I had to get up again to drain fluid. A few times of this and I never achieved good sleep status.
Eventually, just before the sun that was supposed to come up that never came up, I fell asleep. Finally, I was dreaming along. I think because my sleep was so unsettling I awoke remembering my dream, or at least I was feeling it.
In my dream I was rollerblading. But, strangely, I was rollerblading to the play-by-play announcing of WEEI’s Joe Castiglione who for decades has broadcast the Red Sox baseball games. I had listened to the game — a sad Red Sox loss to the Tampa Bay Rays — the previous sight. The broadcast must have carried over.
In my dream, Castiglione was analyzing how major league ballplayers also liked to rollerblade … and several of them were actually rollerblading along with me. For some reason, he was commenting on my particular style of blading and complimenting how I smartly used the tilt lay of the raised middle of the pavement in order to gain greater speed.
Right at the point where I was feeling almost famous, what with being mentioned with so many big league ballplayers and actually rollerblading with a lot of them … I suddenly woke up in the severe agony of a charley horse in my left calf. Turned out I wasn’t rollerblading at all. I was simply feeling the pain in sleep of an old man!
Anyway, somewhat in a daze, I pulled myself out of bed and limped for the coffee pot, then aimed for my computer where I live every day. Fortunately, when I sat down, the pain from my charley horse had subsided as I successfully convinced myself it wasn’t real. Or was it? You know, things aren’t really normal when you’ve grown old.
So it’s 8 am and I’ve beat back enough of the night enough to declare a night’s sleep and that a new day had begun. I check through the news headlines, read some of the reporting, do some searches based on what I read and then began viewing my Facebook and Twitter messaging. Except for the charley horse and the lack of sunshine, it was another typical Covid-19 day.
For me, it meant another day of being a hermit and keeping away from humans. Due to the corona variants and my own medical susceptibilities, I’ve done a damn good job staying away from nearly all of ’em. I’ve become Thoreau without the woods, a seaside hermit on the top floor in company with two cats and birds and squirrels in the trees surrounding my deck. When I gaze into the bay I see the ducks and all … and lots of boats nobody seems to use anymore.
So I get a notification that Consortium News has an excellent program — featuring Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter and others — scheduled to air on YouTube at 9 am.
At 8:59, seconds away from show time, my computer blanks out with a message stating an error caused need for a Hewlett-Packard review. Huh? What? Why and how? Never saw that one before. I tried every trick in the book to get my computer working again, but to no avail — it had frozen!
How ironic this would happen right at the beginning of the radical left-wing Consortium News presentation. These days, in moments like this, conspiracy theories become rampant: Was The Deep State at it again? Was the unexplained blockage meant for the show’s presenters? For me? Who was doing what to whom, and why? Was some giant commercial algorithm stealing data? A political debate enemy perhaps? All kinds of things run through one’s brain when this happens.
I chalked it up to something akin to my charley horse: As my pain went away, my computer will come back.
Not having any luck, I resorted to my back-up computer … only to find myself going through all kinds of new hell: this password didn’t fit or got changed, a phone number which changed didn’t get assigned to the right account and an old Twitter account got mixed in with a new Twitter account but under the same email address, so my old account kept overriding my new account. A new kind of hell — nothing seemed to fit right!
Meanwhile, Ida dribbled just enough soaking so neither I or my cats would go outside for fresh air. But then that’s another problem, one leading to a serious question: Do they [we] still have fresh air? Seems like all summer I’ve been out on my deck inhaling an acrid trace of smoke from West Coast fires. No smoke today, as the rainy Ida saw to that.
All in all, despite taking all sorts of twists and turns I didn’t want, I made it through not much of a day. It’s evening now and the Red Sox are again playing the Rays and Joe Castiglione is on the radio with the Sox on top 1 to 0 in the bottom of the 2nd. Strike that. They’re now down 2 to 1 in the bottom of the 4th. So it goes …!
[UPDATE: Good things can happen on a bad day! Red Sox rookie Jarren Duran hit an RBI single in the top 9th and the Sox won 3 to 2!]
On the bright side, with all that’s gone wrong through the day, at least I’ve got plenty of tobacco, my magic box is full and the rum is prodigious in the bottle. My cats are fed and happy and I still keep my smile in front of my face!
Finally. Time to make a drink, twist up some smoke and read what I wrote, this in the strength of knowing they’ll be a new day tomorrow and I will again get to ask: Why go out there in order to make tomorrow become so!?!
