I can’t remember the last time this happened.
But it’s a thing. A frustrating thing. A thing I think about on car rides which gets me wondering what’s wrong with me.
But rather than talk about what I haven’t done, I thought I'd change things up a bit and instead talk about:
Augie’s Animal Adventures
It started on the walk to work the other day. It’s summer here, so there is this loud and incessant... chirp... this ‘sasasasasa’ sound that, if your mind doesn’t learn to just disregard it, will drive a sane person to committing unspeakable acts. You never see these critters that make the noise. But you know what they are. Cicadas. You hear their noise. You see the husks of their metamorphosis clinging to the barks of trees. But you never see these ninja bugs. Well, I don’t anyway. Not until this week. I saw one emerge from it’s thing. What an adventure.
I get into my office and see that Squalt’s looking a bit droopy. So I go to lift the pot to judge if there’s still water in there, and my fingers brush something... cold... and... squishy. Needless to say, I play it totally cool until I can get a good look at this green thing perched on the lip of the pot. Surprise, surprise, it’s a pretty decent sized frog! Edible size. A primary school child could have eaten it for morning tea size. Incredible, really, given that there are no windows or doors in my office that lead to the outside world, and we’re on the first level (not ground level) of an enclosed building. How did that frog get in there? Was it hiding in the plant when I bought it? Has it always just been lurking about, sipping my leftover tea and nomming on my secret stash of lollies? What an adventure!
That night, my head is everywhere. I realized that I have my very own locked room mystery. The Sign of Frog. I hear a knock on my bedroom window and I almost shit myself, but I manage to hold it in. There’s this clattering sound outside, as though someone’s fumbling with the lock. I regret never investing money in wasp spray (to blind mother flipping intruders. It also kills snakes). I get to the window, pull aside the blinds to find... a bat! It stares at me, wide eyed, caught with a half eaten mango. An immediate kinship is formed because the look reminds me of that time when the lights turned on as I raided the fridge. A mango had somehow fallen from the tree and gotten wedged on my screen door so it was partaking in a fruit fiesta. I tell you, bats are ugly little buggers. And they stink. What an adventure! A sticky, smelly adventure.
I don’t know why I saw so many animals that day. Maybe they were signs – calls to epic adventures that start with gaining superpowers and end with saving the world or becoming incredibly rich, or ideally both. Who knows?
*not counting reports. I’ve written a ton of reports. A mountain of reports. A floating wasteland in the middle of the sea load of reports.