It’s almost time to plan my next excavation.

Of course, it’s not what you might think.  Unless you think it’s time to clean out the fridge, which I call an “excavation” because it sounds more fun.

As with any excavation, you start by putting down a grid, so that you can record where each and every artifact removed from the site was originally located.   For reference sake, I also append a depth chart to accurately record which layer in each grid has yielded the objects in question.

At this point, there can be no more procrastination. Sending in a canary to detect noxious emissions is unwise, they never come back, and let’s face it, we all know this is an expensive way to find out what we already knew, and you’ll now have a dead canary to excavate.  Just put the money toward a gas mask. Two to three pairs of latex gloves worn simultaneously would also be a wise plan. In fact, if you can afford it, a full hazmat suit would not be entirely ridiculous.

Now that you can’t smell the site, the work begins. It’s best to think of this as the remains of an ancient civilization, where every remnant is a vital clue to understanding history.  As you carefully sift the debris, place any decaying organic matter into a black waste matter disposal unit.
Items which cannot be sifted are what I call “artifacts.” These should be taken back to camp for proper cleaning, identification and cataloging. I usually just put them by the kitchen sink.

Last dig, there was a very confusing moment when I uncovered elements which were clearly dated to the bronze age in the middle of a level of stone age debris.  How could I explain the contradictions in my analysis?

A further search and careful digging uncovered the key evidence:  the jar of ketchup, which I remembered falling a few weeks ago. In its collapse, it probably drug some of the upper layer bronze age material with it into the stone age.  Hopefully, the bottle didn’t cause too much damage to the fragile artifacts in the bottom layers.  Fortunately, the jar itself was still intact.

The mysteries reveal themselves bit by bit.  The soft, green coloring near the back wall, looked like it could be part of an exquisite painting of Osiris, and I started to suspect that this could be a tomb for more than canaries!  Or, it might just be that bell pepper I bought six months ago for a batch of lentil soup.  I wondered where it had ended up.

My hopes of finding the lost tomb of Tetisheri disappeared with that realization. Also, I discovered the seal on the gas mask had slipped, and I was probably hallucinating. I closed down the dig for the day.

A few more hours, and the site would be cleared to bedrock. It was another thrilling excavation, and would be months before I’d start planning the next one, and for that, everyone was grateful. Especially the canaries.

Denver International Airport is the center of 47 different conspiracies. I know this because the Internet told me so, and the Internet would never lie to me.

First, there’s the theory that the shadow government has its headquarters in the miles of tunnels underneath the facility. Elvis is frequently spotted by maintenance workers. He usually comes out to play poker with Dick Cheney.

Another theory postulates that aliens are using the fiberglass teepee-like structures of the main terminal as a homing antenna for their invasion fleet, and as a giant greenhouse for growing sentient gelatin from invisible, irradiated mold found in the temples of Machu Picchu. The gelatin will be used to turn humans into zombies or batteries or something equally sinister.

There is some speculation that the artwork throughout the structure contains symbolic codes which, when activated by the correct Masonic rituals, the walls open to release a hidden army of cyborgs, ready to throw down all the world’s governments.

There are ominous interpretations of the granite monument that the airport claims is a time capsule. It’s just covered with more of those threatening symbols of the Masons, and engraved with the words “New World Airport Commission,” which practically screams their true intentions to the universe. I heard that the Queen of England, a well-known Illuminatus, has been secretly and anonymously buying up the property surrounding the airport. Possibly for a place to hide Princess Diana, who, we all know, is not really dead, just imprisoned somewhere in the Tower.

I’m not entirely sure why conspiracy theorists think the Masons need cyborgs to throw over governments. By that token, they’re not being very good at being secret by plastering their intentions all over public places. I mean, aren’t the Masons already in control of the government through their secret power bases and subtle means?

Isn’t their way better? Rule in secret? Cyborgs and sparkling neon signs don’t really seem their style. Way too flashy.

The murals in the airport, which I’ve seen, but, never truly appreciated for their end-of-the world implications, likely because I misplaced my crazy-colored glasses, supposedly depict Nazis, illustrated depictions of the coming Mayan 2012 apocalypse, and a comfy chair.

I suspect that the artwork symbols are really a control panel for the hell minion standing on the outskirts of the airport. You know the one. Blue-Who-Must-Not-Be Named. He’s much more frightening then cyborgs, and has laser eye-beams and a terrible, horrible, death-whinny.

Having just typed that, I realize the truth. There’s no way that “Blucifer” can be controlled by mere arcane symbols.

He probably waits until no one is watching, and comes to life to breathe fire, shoot his eye-lasers, and, I don’t know, eat babies. Maybe this is the key. The only thing that is keeping our children safe at night is the compulsion to stare at that horrifying blue mustang.

Maybe he really guards the five mysterious buildings that were completed and then buried intact. These were built by the Illuminati, They probably figured that Denver, so enamored of its football team, would not suspect a horse being a secret weapon guarding the headquarters of a pending genocide to usher in the New World Order if it was packaged in the shape of a blue horse.

They have a point, after all. Just ask the city of Troy.

I am a collector of found things.

In my day job, that is. By day, I am a mild-mannered receptionist. By night, I am asleep. Usually.

Being a receptionist, my centrally located desk becomes the obvious place to leave items that have been spotted, probably lost shortly before, but now found by another. They come to me, and most of them never leave.

Sure, I try and reunite them with their owner. I send an e-mail to everyone to alert them that a new item has been placed in my care. If the item is not claimed within a few hours, it never will be.

I have collected three earrings, five gloves, a bunch of mix CDs, two buttons, three pairs of sunglasses, a hat, a few pens, an old cup with some writing that looks Aramaic, and a ring that makes people invisible when they wear it.

Things such as keys don’t last long in my collection. Same goes with good stuff like flash drives, cell phones, computers and food.

Me being me, the unclaimed items take on a tragic air. I imagine that these lost things are trapped in a torturous limbo, separated from their owners and their purpose. In my mind, they were the favored objects of a person who can’t afford to replace them, and with their loss, their owner is now dying of pneumonia and cursed with blindness as their eyes are ruined by exposure the sun with no protection. This poor person can’t even mourn the loss of the earrings, which are the last heirlooms of their ancient and noble family, once heralded with land and titles.

At what point do I toss the mix CDs? When do I give up and admit they are never going to be claimed? I’m sure I’ve given those things more thought than their former owners, who probably burned new copies ten minutes after they learned they were lost. I’ve been storing these items in the vain hope that someone will come in looking for them, and will be so grateful I have taken such good care of them for so long, that they are compelled to thank me in exceedingly lavish ways for my faithful guardianship. The more time that passes, the more this seems like sheer stupidity.

And then I remember that the penniless descendant of a noble family lost these items, and I feel guilty about throwing any of these things away. I suspect my predecessor felt the same way, as I inherited at least three of the gloves, one of the sunglasses and the hat from her. I wonder if I’ve stumbled across an unwritten but sacred duty of receptionists everywhere: to be forever entrusted with accumulating and protecting a building’s flotsam. In that case, maybe I ought to get a bigger shelf.

There was a time when, if you were to mention “date night” to me, I would imagine that mythological annual event in which a person of the male persuasion would appear on my doorstep, open the car door and drive me somewhere in his car and then *pay* for an evening’s entertainment. A person other than my father.

That image is long gone, put on the shelf next to unicorns and cable companies with customer service you actually enjoy calling. I no longer even hope that I might possibly ever see another one of those fabled nights. Instead, the fantasy image of “date night” has been replaced with an image of chat client software and the antics of ghost hunters.

Date night in my house is the weekly ritual of three sisters separated by hundreds of miles but united by a common need to mock cheesy reality television. It goes something like this:

Me: *Pet name for one of the guys which is too colorful for the eyes of my discerning readers* is pretending to see something interesting again!
Sis2oncouch: He’s probably *salty comment.*
Sis1faraway: LOL! I bet he is. Maybe he’s found *something very improbable*
Me: HA! That *is* improbable. It’d be more likely that he found the Holy Grail while skiing in Hades.
Sis2oncouch: *something really funny, but, only if you had read the actual rest of the conversation, and not this redacted version*
Sis1faraway: ROFL. Can’t breathe.
Me: *Makes the funniest joke any of us have ever heard*
Sis1faraway: Tears. Dying. STOP. I mean it. Really can’t breathe.
Me: I win! (calls 911)
Sis2oncouch: That wasn’t the funniest joke I ever heard, and you’d better not say that in your column. Besides, I’m funnier. And if Sis1faraway is really dead, I am *so* telling mom on you. You will be in *so* much trouble.

But, only one hour of ghost hunters is not enough.

After the EMPs have faded into the credits, we pop in DVDs of whatever series we’re currently mocking. Usually, we pick something that requires little concentration, because half the time we’re not really watching it. We pick TV series’ we’ve seen a number of times, or something so simple that the plot could be followed by aliens watching three systems away at the same time that they recalibrate their naughty probes, sketch out their next crop circle patterns, edit a cookbook of long pork recipes, check their toddler’s calculus homework, and balance their financial accounts.

We spend about three hours in front of our computers, listening to the television, one night a week. During that time, we lose ourselves to the glow of the computer screen, and hope that it doesn’t turn us into zombies or grow unsightly appendages. Although, it might be nice to have an extra arm. It might finally let me type faster than Sis1faraway.

I know I’m officially old now, because I no longer enjoy leftover pizza straight out of the fridge. It has to be reheated in the microwave for me to think it’s remotely appetizing.
It happened suddenly.

One day, I was happy, munching on the tasty cold triangles of young adult bliss, and the next day my stomach is turning at the very thought of putting a congealed blob of nastiness anywhere near my mouth.

It was like someone, somewhere, flipped the “no longer a youngster” switch, and now I insist on eating it warmed to the appropriate temperature.  I feel old just writing that. Did I just use the term “youngster?”

I remember the smugness of my youth, sneering at those “fogies” that insisted on warming their pizza. “It tastes fine cold!” I’d say, or even “It tastes better cold.”  Now I am the fogie, and I can hardly wait until some whipper-snapper mocks my need to microwave. The circle of life.

I did it again. I added “whipper-snapper “ and “fogie” to the evidence against me.

Somehow, it was this, more than most things,  that really made me realize that I have arrived at middle age. I am not amused.

I hadn’t expected a sign like this, or even imagined it would make such an impact. I expected things like arthritis and gray hairs, so those didn’t impact me nearly as much as a need to have my pizza hot. Worse, I just figured it was a preference thing, not a sign of advanced age.

It’s probably signaling a host of other changes that I thought were personality quirks and not age-related mutations. I can see thigh-high pants pulled to the middle of my chest in my future. I’m starting to feel a “Get off my lawn you rotten kids” coming on. Like any never married female of a certain age, I wonder if I’m starting to develop a need for excessive house cats. Could unintelligible speech, ragged clothing, and an urge to hurl these felines be close behind?

I have never been especially fond of cats, but, if I come over all cat obsessed, my family needs to know this is a signal to break out the nursing home. It might soon be time for that pamphlet entitled “So, your family thinks it’s time for you to exit life by walking onto the polar ice cap.” If there are still polar ice caps when my time comes.

Part of me had never imagined turning into my grandparents without children and grandchildren of my own. How can you be old if there is no one from the next generation to roll their eyes at you and threaten you with expulsion to the cheapest nursing home that money can buy? Who will I bore with long rants about living in the “aughts,” or lie to about having invented the Internet?

Maybe I can find some kids on the Internet that I can rent for a few weeks every year.   I’ll work on that right after I put the cat out.

 

Dear Self,

Do not allow the weeds to get to knee-height ever again. It is much better to have several days between mowing than it is to have to mow everything twice in the same day. Every time you tell your future self “it can wait,” you should envision a puppy hanging over a pit of lava, with its paws getting toasty. It cannot wait.

Even if you find three left-hand gloves and zero right hand gloves, it is not better to just mow with one glove. Despite the fact that the puppy is getting uncomfortably warm, find a full pair of gloves or suffer the additional torment of a blistered hand.

In addition, remember that the vast majority of the growing things in your yard are of the milkweed-type, and that you are allergic to those, so when you are clearing their moist, green, pulpy remains from the mower, don’t use your non-gloved hand, unless you want it to quickly swell to the size of a dustbin lid, attain an angry red hue and itch like that spot on the bottom of your foot you can never reach..

On that note, do not reach up to clear your vision of blowing hair with your dustbin lid hand. Swollen faces and itchy eyes will see no better than eyes covered by hair. In fact, it’s likely to be much worse. Remember, it was you who insisted you didn’t need to wear a hat.

Since you are not particularly fit, it would be good to remember that after choking out the mower 300 times before you are halfway done, you will find restarting the mower increasingly difficult as the timeline to complete the chore lengthens. Also, if you happen to mow over a plastic sack hidden in the depths of your weed jungle, it can wind itself around the spindle that rotates the blade, and make the choking thing happen even more. Remove the bag with your gloved hand. Not that the other hand could perform the task any longer.

Apply topical anti-allergy gel to your dustbin hand early in the proceedings, as swollen hands don’t grip well, and your mower might not be secure, and might cause you to trip and fall when it doesn’t turn the way you you’d expect. Good thing it shuts off when you release the lever, fall to the ground and skin your elbow. You’ll be grateful you don’t have to worry about chasing the darn thing as you lie on the sidewalk feeling exceptionally stupid.

It is best to eat something before you spend a few hours exerting yourself. If you just decide not to procrastinate any more, and that waiting to eat something will only kill your momentum and you haven’t eaten a full meal yet, expect your blood sugar to crash just about the halfway point, forcing you to grab some hollow calories to be able to finish the stupid task and not have to lug the mower out another day.

When you ignore all this and it all happens again, you will deserve the “I told you so,” because this time, you actually bothered to write it all down as soon as your hand returned to its normal proportions.

 

I quit several times every day.

Usually,  I quit my day job first, then, I quit my night job, then I quit the dishes, then I quit my weekend job, then I quit caring, and then I quit quitting and start the whole cycle all over again.

Most of the time, I’m serious when I say it. I say it under my breath, try the sentiment on for size, and decide I’m not really much of a quitter, and go on about my not quitting.

Other times, I’m more than serious when I say it, and I have a long conversations with myself. I say “You can’t quit,” and I answer myself with “Why not?” At this point, the amount of cynicism I have stored in my bile ducts will determine how convincing I find the counterargument. If the cynicism levels are high, I will not be able to find a good reason not to quit.

On those occasions, I begin to work through the Script of Futility.  This is filled with brilliantly depressing one-liners, but the main through line is me reminding myself of the definition of insanity, where I have continued to do the same thing over and over again, and I get exactly the same results every time. These results are not encouraging. Having thus questioned my own sanity, I continue to harvest my own cynicism, and race down the Tunnel of Reasons Quitting is the Only Answer.

The Tunnel leads to a fork in the script. One branch plays all the “Against all Odds” tropes, where I remind myself of the people who kept going, and achieved great things. The other path is much darker, and plays themes of “sometimes, quitting is the smartest thing you can do,” and “if you continue to get a headache banging your head against the wall, not only are you stupid, but you’re about to be concussed.”

If I’m following the path of darkness, my brain likes to tell me that my failure to quit is just the latest in my ongoing string of “other than successes,” and then it laughs at the irony, which means I will resume my less-than-sane endeavors, despite not having any good reason to continue.

This specific column, I must’ve started and stopped more than 50 times. I kept telling myself there was no way I could fill a full 500 words on my failure to quit, and I should stop thinking about quitting and my failures to quit, and just write about Mother’s Day. Everyone’s probably expecting me to write about that.

From there, I argued with myself, saying, “I don’t really feel like writing about Mother’s Day,” and “Since when did I do what everyone was expecting me to do?” It’s been a Parade of Self-doubt all weekend.

And then, somewhere along the parade route, the weather took a turn for the better, and people smiled and waved in a friendly fashion, and it became a good day. When that happens, I feel that there is meaning in continuing down the path which now is playing the “Against all Odds” tropes. That’s when I am glad to continue, because having one small spark of hope is more than a good enough reason to not quit.

Someone once told me I should be a philosopher. I was very flattered. I imagined that I had said something wise and intellectual, or that I had caused her to examine her ideas or to change perspectives, or think of things that she’d never thought before.

And then the neurosis kicked in and I wondered if what she really meant was that I had the look of an unemployed, malnourished, homeless person. Possibly, she meant I thought too much and spoke in unintelligible phrases sounding vaguely like they came from a pretentious fortune cookie.

I ran to the bathroom to check out option number one. I clearly had the wild-eyed stare. My hair looked wind-blown and disheveled. My clothes, well, they were my normal, “not at work” look, which…

Yeah. Option one was a distinct possibility. The good news was that my deodorant appeared to be working and nothing was caught between my teeth. Currently.

Of course, there was always option two. Perhaps her comment was a reflection of an unconscious habit? Perhaps I spoke in paradoxes or riddles, or some other, important sounding, but ultimately nonsensical, phrases. Maybe she caught me on a day when I’d been to the dentist and uttered knowing lines like “The lion waits for the marmot to hide the casserole,” or “when two caterpillars share a leaf, the tree cannot fail to find a pillow.”

Could there be an option three?

Maybe she was saying something really unappealing. Perhaps she was wishing that I would end up in obscurity somewhere, writing thoughts no one would ever read, except for other philosophers. Maybe she was imagining that I would spend my nights writing useless dreck and my days I would spend asking such meaningful universe expanding questions such as “Would you care to Super Size that for a mere 39 cents more?”

Going back to the complimentary options, I did day dream for a few moments and imagine what life would be like if I could spend my work day doing nothing but thinking great thoughts and writing about ideas, and I remembered how many ideas I already have and how much they torment me day and night and force me to do drastic things. I shuddered and went searching for some brain bleach to banish the thought of more thinking from my brain.

I have no idea what would prompt me to talk about such things. Why would anyone spend this much time analyzing a simple comment? What could prompt me to spend hours trying to figure out whether it was a complement, or an insult, or what prompted someone to say such a thing to me? I could think of only a single answer to this insane train of thought. I probably had a column deadline.

April is about to find itself off my Christmas list.

I’d thought, with it about to be over and all, that I could simply pretend everything was fine, and that we’d just not speak about it until next year.  It’s much easier to ignore the problem, and hope it goes away than it is to talk about it, and acknowledge the painful truths about “the cruelest month.”

I never really thought I’d agree with Eliot on this point, and yet, April continues to conspire against us all, waging a war of violence and extended winter.

Over the course of my life, I was willing to let April and its reputation for cruelty simply pass by. “It’s an illusion, “ I told myself, “April can’t be all that bad. There must be some wonderful events that happened in April, and everyone forgets about them, because they focus on the bad stuff.”

I shouldn’t have looked.

And yet, look I did.

I opened the Google, and found a list of the prominent events of Aprils past. I knew of Shakespeare’s birthday and Earth Day, surely, there was some other reason to celebrate the month.  I thought it would make a “feel-good” story for the end of the month, when I could bring up the glories of the fourth month of the year.

Sadly, I’ve already pretty much shared with you the entirety of the “good stuff.”

Given how slim the pickings are I considered padding the list out by reminding everyone that it’s the month the Civil War ended. Unfortunately, you’d probably also remember It’s also the month it started, so that hardly puts it in the plus column. And, of course, Booth couldn’t be bothered to wait until May for his assassination of Lincoln, on no, he wanted to put the blame squarely on the front porch of April’s many crimes.

There are a handful of other pluses to the month, but, they are inadequate to the task of lifting the month out of its dark roots.  All I wanted was to feel better about April, and ended up feeling much, much worse.

At this point, I tried to reassure myself that every other month has probably got an equally high proportion of horrible events, so singling April out for the misdeeds it happens to harbor is entirely unfair.  It seems unlikely that any month could be so cosmically ordained to be skewed toward the craptacular.

This was the point I realized I really didn’t want to know.

I didn’t want to scroll through pages of horrible tragedy to see if there is such a thing as a month filled with the most despair, or to prove that April can’t possibly be the worst month on the calendar.

In the midst of the Googling, I was reminded that April is National Poetry Month, and I could no longer decide whether this was evidence that it was the worst month of the year, or whether it was just coincidence. Is its occurrence in April an indicator that people should focus on poetry to push past the gloom?  Or does it just mean that April is such a downer that every sensitive soul destined to document their pretentious inner turmoil increases their output in April?

There’s two days left of April for the year. Only two days for it to work its way back onto my “nice” list. April, I’m begging you, please. Do us all a solid. Bring us something awesome.

I really wish I could master the art of sleepwriting.  I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. It could be something I just made up. Or, maybe it’s a secret writer thing that once you non-writers have heard about, I will have to be killed, or you will, or both. Sorry about that.

Of course, it could simply be a super-efficient use of time that allows me to get really high quality sleep while simultaneously filtering all the thoughts running through my head into brilliant, scintillating prose. Well, more brilliant than usual, I suppose.

I am starting to believe that I just made that up.

But, maybe I could invent sleepwriting, and master it, and then take on followers who are aching to learn this incredibly useful art, and I can charge them outrageously, and develop festive eccentricities and arbitrary and capricious rules for it just to mess with people.

I could start now, even. All I have to do is stay a few steps in the process ahead of my minions, I mean, stupidly wealthy students, I mean, generous benefactors, and they’ll never know I’m a complete and utter fraud.

Unless of course they read that. I’ll just edit that part later to make it more charmingly eccentric.

I suspect even insomniacs will want to pay to learn these techniques. Maybe even other artists or type-A personalities will want to know this method so that they can apply it to their own situations and be productive and rested all the time. I think this is clearly my ticket to fame, fortune, not to mention more rest and increased output.

Part of me suspects I might’ve been half asleep when I came up with this notion. Another part wonders if it was the offspring of one of those mornings when the alarm goes off to get me out of bed early to write, and I really wanted to stay there and sleep. A sliver of me thinks that it came from wanting an easy method to siphon off my thoughts when I can’t get my brain to stop and I’m trying to sleep. The largest part of me wonders how I managed to call all of those suspicions individual ideas, when they are probably all the same thing, and probably all true.

Looking back through these thoughts, I’m beginning to wonder how many parts of me there are. Maybe a quick nap will clear that right up.