In the first place, when Kayak Woman comes home from a long day of work, she likes to take off her shoes, put away her work computer and change out of whatever rags she’s trying to pass off as business casual before she does ANYTHING. She doesn’t appreciate it when she encounters an ALIEN standing IN THE ENTRY WAY obfuscating her ability to take off her shoes. In a THUNDERCHICKEN t-shirt, NO LESS! And when he immediately asks, “You’d like to take Ernie and Alfred for a walk, wouldn’t you?”, in those exact words, BEFORE she has even come in the door? She does not appreciate that either. And of course, the words “Ernie”, “Alfred”, and “walk” only kicked Ernie and Alfred into overdrive so that they began barking frantically and trying to jump over the dog gate and out of the kitchen but only Ernie was actually able to make the leap because Alfred is too short.

Secondly, Kayak Woman does not often talk about her dreams because, not only are they too convoluted to describe so that anyone could actually understand them (including Kayak Woman), they are also often quite disturbing. Sometimes they are so disturbing that she doesn’t manage to shake loose from them until she has had a shower and several miles of walking. Dodging skunks in the dark has a way of bringing one back to reality in short order. So she’ll just say that a tiny little subplot of nightmare du jour consisted of watching a movie on DVD in which the female star kept getting assaulted by men while she walked in a nice, “safe” neighborhood. Kind of like Kayak Woman’s neighborhood except that a sorta Lombard Drive-looking street was right in the middle of it all. With ice and snow on it. Go figger. Kayak Woman protested repeatedly (in the dream), “this is so stupid, it’s perfectly safe to walk around town by yourself. I do it all the time and that never happens to me.” And then she woke up. Yes, the rest of this blather is not a dream. When she walked into the school yard this morning, there was an old coot with a bicycle and NO CLOTHES who was picking big round white flowers out of the Haisley garden. Except it turned out that he actually had pants on, she just hadn’t been able to see them at first because he was partially obscured by a bush. As if this wasn’t odd enough at 6:00 AM, KW RECOGNIZED him! A neighbor. Numbers’s dad. She called out a cheery, “Good morning!” and he looked at her as if he had been caught red-handed. He needn’t have worried. KW is not the Haisley Garden Police. And so, she went on her way, wondering about the phase of the moon or if it was just the art fair bringing out the crazies.

Oh, and KW does not regularly have dogs or any other beasties. She just borrows Ernie and Alfred once in a while because it is so much fun to pick up dog poop and haul it around in a plastic bag.

Ciao, Bambinos

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.