Irrelevant Cheetah

It’s cold outside today. Damn cold. Our high temperature today was 6, which isn’t even a good score if you’re in a diving competition. I really think this winter is the one I’m going to be telling my grandchildren about: “Yup! The winter of ’06, it was. Hand me my teeth, will ya? That’s a good kid. Yup, I remember that year. It got so cold our candle flames froze, and we had to hold them in our hands to thaw them out so we could keep warm.”

I got some good sleep last night, and I’m still trying to determine if that’s a good thing or not. When I get enough sleep, something strange happens. I wake up in the morning and my body says “Whoa! Hold on there, cowboy! What’s with this ‘8 hours of sleep’ nonsense? How do you expect to continue living the half-assed existence you currently live if you go getting sleep all willy-nilly?” Then the other voices in my head chime in, and it’s actually pretty entertaining.

But seriously, when the stars are in perfect alignment and I’m in bed 8 hours before it’s time to get up for work, when I wake up my brain goes into overdrive almost immediately after the first cup of java, and the ideas just fly. And then I come with sentences like that last one.

I am also more observant. Take work, for instance, and the appliances I am assigned. I’m not sure if the computer I’m currently using actually has a microprocessor inside. Based on its speed and multi-tasking ability, I think it’s actually inhabited by an obsessive-compulsive gerbil with an abacus. But it’s all I’ve got to work with because the multi-billion-dollar corporation that currently employs me cannot afford another computer for me. Luckily, when I started work this particular doorstop happened to actually power on, so I was saved from having to work the abacus myself. Have you ever tried giving Unix commands with an abacus? It’s almost as bad as trying to connect to the internet using E.T.’s ‘Phone Home’ machine. Text files aren’t too bad, as the ‘See & Say’ can interpret them all right, but JPEGs and GIFs just don’t translate well at all, and if I want to download a binary file, like a cracked version of Final Fantasy 87, it’ll take about a month. And forget YouTube.

So how did I get here? Oh, that’s right. I was talking about sleep. Did you know that the colder your room is, the more likely it is that you’ll have a bad dream? So I wonder what kind of dream I’d have if it were 6 degrees inside. Probably some nonsense about a computer and a stranded alien.

Now if I could just get my See & Say to tell my coffee maker that I want espresso…

“Thank you for calling information. What city, please?”
“Wonderland.”
“Thank you. What listing?”
“Alice.”
“Last name?”
“Why? How many Alices in Wonderland are there?”
“Oh – just the one, sir. The number is 867-5309.”

“Thanks.” I scrawled the number on a scrap of paper and hung up. It was too late to call her. Even I don’t call a chick after midnight. Well, I have, but only when I’m looking for something. Like bail. And though that number seemed oddly familiar, I wasn’t going to call yet. I didn’t want to risk another restraining order until after I got paid. It had only taken me one time to learn that lesson.

The next step was to figure out what “T.K.” stood for. I had assumed it meant The Knave, which is why I had laced the other mocha with Rohypnol, just in case he felt like thanking me for his recent jaunt through the clink. But if that had been the Knave, then his cellmate Bruno had done more of a number on him than I had expected. It was brainstorming time.

Half an hour later I had this list:
The Knave
The Killer
True Knowledge
‘Til Kathy
Taciturn Katydid
Tense Kleenex
Tunklewood Knunderscape
I wasn’t sure about that last one, but it was as valid as any of the others, and they say that in brainstorming you have to toss your inner judge out of the window.

After some thought, I decided that although Tunklewood was a really cool name, I was going to go with “The Killer.” And though I thought I knew who it might be, I needed to ask Alice a few questions first.

I knew her story – most schoolkids did. She’d fallen in via a rabbit hole and gotten involved with some nasty characters, like the Caterpillar. She’d narrowly escaped some perjury charges and had even been suspected of animal rights violations when they couldn’t find the Cheshire Cat. Eventually some guy named Carroll had written her biography, and she’d gone incognito to avoid the paparazzi. She turned up every now and then in a chess game, and she made the rounds of the professional croquet circuit, but stayed out of the public eye for the most part.

What I needed to know, though, was if (and why) she had a thing for eggs, because an egg fetish would explain a lot. An overactive mothering instinct, which I thought was the case, could possibly put this case to bed. I checked the time. It was 4:30 AM. Time to get some sleep. And first thing in the morning, I’d be calling Alice.

To Be Continued…

Well, I had my first day at my new job today. I guess I’m blogging this not because it’s particularly interesting, but just because a few of you guys have been supporting me through this whole lay-off deal and I wanted to keep you updated and thank you for your support and encouragement.

I’m a data processor for an oilfield services company. Without going into too much boring detail, it’s a lot of math, a lot of science, and a lot of computers. In other words, right up my alley.

So I can begin to concentrate on my writing and other important things again, now that I’m no longer worried about supporting my family and being a useless lump on the couch.

Once again, thanks for the support. I’m going to bake each and every one of you a pie.

A concept that has been fascinating me lately is that of simultaneity and parallelism, in the mundane, everyday sense of the world.

Perhaps I should explain.

If you’re familiar with Einstein and relativity (both special and general) you’re aware that he pretty much took the concept of simultaneous occurrences and threw it out the window. He said, basically, that the idea of two things happening at the same time is meaningless, because an observer moving through space may happen to disagree with you as to whether event A happened before event B, after it, or at the exact same time, and you’d both be right.

But this, while true, doesn’t jive with my internal sense of time. I know, deep in my bones, that something outside of my observational window of events is happening right now. As I sit at my desk writing this, sipping my coffee and contemplating my next choice of words, all kinds of conceivable activities are occurring right this second. Somebody somewhere is making love. Somebody somewhere else is killing another human being. Somebody’s feeding the chickens, somebody’s driving to work, somebody’s bathing in the creek, and somebody’s making a decision to buy one stock instead of selling another one. Somebody else is sleeping, while somebody else is nodding off behind the wheel, or in class.

And this doesn’t even begin to cover all of the possible occurrences. That’s just the human side of the picture. If you take into consideration all of space-time, then we’re adding in the idea that there are stars going nova and being born and galaxies colliding and planets forming and rogue asteroids being swallowed by black holes and aliens figuring out their local version of the wheel and …

It’s mind boggling. If I start to think about it – I mean, really think about it – I have to stop before long, because I get dizzy. I don’t think the human mind is designed to comprehend Now, and by Now I mean one big mental picture of all occurrences at once – a sort of mental snapshot of the Universe. My mind can’t even grasp a mental snapshot of the planet during one ‘slice’ of time.

One thing that invariably happens when I have these ‘moments’ is that I begin to feel very small. Not insignificant (though I have those thoughts sometimes as well) but small. I realize that I am just one of 6,000,000,000 people on the planet whose lives and daily minutiae are just as important, as far as they are concerned, as mine. Nobody’s life is more or less important than anybody else’s. Each person’s existence is the most important thing in the world to him or her.

Right. Well, I’ve waxed philosophical enough, I suppose. I’d be interested in any thoughts or reactions to this.

9:47. I hit the coffee shop at a run, trying to remember the salt-water taffy. The dame working the espresso machine warned me my mocha was hot, but I promptly spilled it on myself in my mad rush to get to the bridge by 10. I had overslept at my desk and was desperate to meet what was my only lead so far in this weird case.

I arrived at 10:02 and found the only working streetlight. Standing in the liquid pool of illumination underneath it was a short figure dressed in black. By ‘short’ I mean ‘shorter than the inseam on those trousers I’ve been meaning to take down to the cleaners.’ He/she/it wore a cloak that completely concealed his/her/its identity.

“I’ll take the taffy,” said T.K. in a raspy voice as I hunched over, gasping for breath. As a P.I. my normal exercise consists of 12-ounce curls and short sprints in attempts to evade my landlord. I made a valiant effort to straighten up and handed the figure the taffy and one of the mochas. A gloved hand reached from under the cloak and took the offered treats. I couldn’t help but notice that the glove was oddly swollen, as if the hand it contained was misshapen. Or not a hand at all.

“Why did you want to see me?” I asked when I had caught my breath. “Did you kill Dumpty?”

“Shut your mouth, flatfoot, and listen.” T.K. sounded like a frog with laryngitis. “Stay away from Alice. She’s mine.” Something glinted underneath the cloak.

“I thought she was Dumpty’s. That’s what she told me, anyway.” I was liking this less and less. Now I knew her name, but it was looking like a love triangle gone wrong. Or else this T.K. character was just scrambled.

“She’s mine,” the hooded figure repeated. “Did you bring a gun?”

“No. Your note said not to.”

“Good for you, flatfoot. You can follow directions. Now follow these. Stay away from Alice, and stay away from this case. Go drown in a bottle of whiskey or whatever it is you do, and forget you saw her. Or me.” With that, the hooded figure gave what sounded like a guy blowing his nose and disappeared into the night.

I was left staring at a few feathers floating away on the night breeze. And that’s when it clicked. Suddenly I had a hunch who had killed Dumpty, and why. And suddenly I had to do some digging, and find out everything I could about the lazy-eyed blonde that I couldn’t get out of my head.

To Be Continued…