Something I’m Working on

Chapter One: Ficus? All of us?

I woke up and remembered dreaming of figs. I don’t know if they were fresh figs, dried figs or the movie How to Frame a Figg, starring comedy legend Don Knotts and Batgirl for some reason. I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t about fresh figs. Why would I dream about a fruit that has the texture of a cyst and tastes like slightly sweetened nothing? There was a time in my life when I really looked forward to tasting a fresh fig for the first time. The experience turned out to be more disappointing than expecting a pony for Christmas and then finding out that was what you had for Christmas dinner. The Germans actually have a word for the disappointment you get while trying a fresh fig for the first time: Nuficussadmaken. It is a beautiful language…

It was three in the morning. Only farmers and security guards get up at three in the morning. Security guards because it is shift work; and, farmers because they have an innate need to add unpleasantness to their lives whenever they can. I grew up on farms. You learn responsibility because everyone had a job to do. I kept a screwdriver with me at all times because, if a horse got loose, it was my job to tighten it up again. Our chickens were free-range so we often found nests full of eggs in the adjoining woods… some fresh enough to eat, some fertilized. I understand that Thai prostitutes love steamed fertilized eggs. When my mother, who is neither Thai nor a prostitute had a bloody embryo fall from the egg shell into her cake mix, she did the only reasonable thing which was to vomit and not eat eggs for a full year. A lesser woman would’ve overreacted…

I suddenly remembered a little more of my dream: I was telling the Secretary of the Interior that he needed to “get outside more”…

When you get a family of people together, who’ve been getting up ridiculously early all their lives, expect them to be drinking coffee at five o’clock, watching CNN with the sound off. And, just because someone gets up early doesn’t mean that are fully functioning. If you wake up early and grouchy, you are probably the type to be grouchy all day long. That would be like living with Jason Statham, only with fewer expensive cars.

There are some people whose dreams foretell the future. My dreams foretell the present; for example, I dreamed once that I was on a cruise ship and I suddenly fell overboard. When I woke up, I was in the ocean and the ship was slowly moving away from me. Another time, I had that dream where I was naked in physics class and no one noticed. When I woke up, I was naked in a physics class and no one was noticing… because engineering students focus THAT hard. Predicting the present is great because it is just as accurate as predicting the past without the need for a long-term memory… which is a godsend at my age…

At four o’clock it is still too early to eat breakfast. If I did, I’d be eating lunch at eight-thirty and dessert five minutes after that. I use this time to improve my mind and also to reflect on my life. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed thinking about all of my faults; but, then I realize it is my faults that make me interesting, unemployable and unloved. Sometimes I see the death and pain of those around me and I wish I’d NEVER bought that tiger.

I’m craving grits. They are an ordeal to prepare. I used to have a way to automate the process. I called her, “Mom”. Mostly, she made us gruel like Cream of Wheat or oatmeal or Ralston. But, on the weekends we might get pancakes or biscuits and gravy. Biscuits and gravy are flour, bacon grease and milk, cooked into a cake form and covered in a sauce made of flour, bacon grease and milk. It tastes better than it sounds because it would have to. Pancakes and waffles were made on a thick-wired, steampunk waffle-iron that looked as if it were designed by Jules Verne and one short-circuit away from standing in for the death chair at Alcatraz.

I dream in color, which is a waste because I mostly dream about penguins, zebras or nuns.