Well, that was something. I was writing about the old vacuum cleaner dying and on LZP’s recommendation, which I overheard while watching a movie in his living room as he and Der Bingle imbibed in the kitchen, getting a Shark. Why they were talking about vacuum cleaners, I have no idea.  But, anyway, when the vacuum died, I bought a Shark and I was writing about it here and POOF, the post disappeared in front of my eyes. Sucked right into the vortex of cyberspace.

But I should be able to deal with that, after all, I got through yesterday when an Elmo balloon got sucked into a ceiling fan and the string round about the mechanism, causing it to stop. Elmo just looked down. We cut him lose, cleared the fan and all seemed well; and then I heard a Whack, Whack and looked up to see that Elmo had once again encounter the fan, but without string had been tossed out the other side. I tied a cord on him and tied that to the table, but later I noticed that a spot in the cord was inexplicably fraying. I have knotted the weak area, but I wonder if I am just delaying some date with destiny this Elmo has. The other Elmos are just floating around, although we did come upon one naughty boy hovering on the ceiling of a bathroom.

Back to the Shark. I have to admit it is fun to watch the dirt being captured in the canister which easily empties from the bottom. I have not put the Shark lengthwise on the floor and jumped it, just in case anyone is wondering. To be honest, I should say, I have not done that yet.

I have, from time to time, stumbled onto a blog in which someone is being very forthright and full of details about some event in their lives. What is prompting this remark is a blog that a few years ago talked about a middle-aged man suddenly finding out he had asymptomatic heart failure, a condition his father had died of at 35. His wife, an author, chronicled the daily progress of his condition; he eventually stabilized.

I suppose my point is that I did not know these people and it was hard to keep in mind that they were real and not characters in a novel or soap opera. Time went on and then he had a major event and she began reporting on what was happening; then she stopped, and not because he died. I find myself thinking, “Well, what happened, what is going on?” It is like falling asleep at the end of a movie and not knowing how things turned out. Of course, I have to keep reminding myself it is not fiction at all, but part of me is wondering about the continuation of the plot, although, as I said, it is not a plot, but real.

It all makes me feel like a voyeur jerk.

Two of us went to see Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation last night because it was someone’s birthday and because we have a really nice refurbished theater in town with $5 ticket prices and the first refill on the popcorn is free. The movie about those fantastic four people was playing on the other screen, but it got a 9 on the Rotten Tomatoes scale and even if it had been highly touted, it is not my type of movie.

In the very first scenes on the MI movie, I found myself thinking of the Bruce Willis movies where all the old spies get together. There were quite a few laughs in the movie and I kept wondering if it were an action film with training wheels for newbies to the genre who needed a slow introduction to the tension present in some of the original ones. THIS IS NOT REAL was virtually stamped on all the actors foreheads, along with THIS IS NOT NEW AND WAS FIRST DONE 30 YEARS AGO  on the foreheads of rubberized facial masks. Of course, all those years ago, the masks were made with a computer 3-D printer in a glass cylinder but that’s just a detail.

In addition to the movie with the birthday, we know have 10 helium balloons floating around the house – five of which are Elmo’s. They are cute; they float to the ceiling and stare down at you with there big Elmo eyes and orange noses; you almost expect them to giggle. It is a tradition that isn’t worth explaining and will probably have disappeared by the time the 19 year old is the age of this scribe.

Because the 19 year old’s mother is working a Baylor Nursing Shift this weekend, we will probably have an on-going birthday week starting Monday. (The day the birthday person has a doctor’s appointment -HAHAHAHAAH. I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. At least it’s not the dentist.)

It was raining this morning and very dark. Right now it is sunny and mid-afternoon and I am sprawled, having straightened myself out from a seated position with hands held in front, as if on a steering wheel. We got in heavy traffic; my passenger got carsick and puked; I drove the speed limit; I did not get a ticket; I did not get any to-go food. As road trips go, it was lacking.

And I missed getting a picture of the new Church of the Solid Rock Jesus Statue – the first one was hit by lightning. Or maybe it just caught fire from too much brimstone in the sermons. Really, it is the Solid Rock Church, but I like the other name better, so I’m going with it.

I’ve been caught up in so many routine errands of living that somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking about things that don’t have actual dimensions. This afternoon, though, I’ve found myself pulling together impressions of the past 36 hours or so and winding up in a territory such as what one would find in a Stephen King novel.

I have the distinct sense that I have seen, if not full-blown evil, than what I find myself calling a varmint – a varmint acting and shaped like a human, but with a badness coming through as a cloud that might at any moment coalesce into a nightmarish miasma. It is a intuitive suggestion that what you know is too awful to be real  is, indeed, real and you know fear is coming. And that “indeed” back there in that sentence, well, it is more of a breathless OH MY GOD.

I am very aware of standing at a sidewalk cafe, cup in hand, with the sun warming both air and the pavement just beyond the shade of the awning, watching normal things go by – actions that happen everyday and never trigger a thought.  And then, across the scene one car passes and you see the hunching driver as a hunching blob that is maybe the essence of the wolf that ate a grandma.

You know that part about, “But  your ears are so big” and so forth? Well, maybe it is the individual features. The mouth, perhaps. The mouth that is just a little bit different in every way from an average feature, a normal feature. Not that there is disfigurement or malformation, just the perception that it is straining to hold steady the lines of the plump upper lip before a giant maw opens.

Only it is not a Stephen King horror story; it is actually something real, but capable of causing great distress. Such an odd feeling. I’ve seen people I’ve thought looked mean, cruel, sharp, testy, but to have a visual memory of one who looks blurred and ominous is unsettling.

Is this what becomes of the things that skulk under a child’s bed, that go bump in the night? Well, for Stephen King, it made him a lot of money; I’m afraid there may be other outcomes. Breaking even might seem like a big win, come to think of it.

While I was mowing Thursday, my daughter-in-law’s mother passed away in Cincinnati. It has been a hectic few days and today I took Alison down to Cincinnati for her mother’s funeral this coming Wednesday. There is not a lot to say at times like this, so I will leave people to their thoughts.

This is better than being behind the mower for five hours, pushing and manhandling it under bushes and such.  It got a little bouncy on the rider – maybe because I was giving it a little too much gas.  I do not have a farmer’s tan now; I have a rider mower’s little old lady tan – LL Bean shorts and mesh-vented shirt with roll-up  sleeves and a hat with a mesh crown.  I walked into Walmart that way and one old gent said, “I like your lid.” Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I could see it was beat up and the brim bent in an odd way. I try to smile when I look like this and hope people will think: Kook, but harmless.