Going over to the dark side

When you get up at 0’Dark 30 on a Saturday morn and it’s a pitch black and a bloody 5 degrees below zero, the mind tends to wander to various depths of perception…and sometimes the shallows. Thoughts are pretty random under these conditions, but they are somehow miraculously tied together by what is a momentary black hole of consciousness. Things just swirl around the event horizon until they are eventually sucked in without a trace.

Like:

Coffee just can’t be hot enough. And when you take that first sacred sip of fresh brew, you know you have nirvana well in hand.

The fire in the woodstove is mesmerizing. This is funny because you don’t necessarily have glass doors on the sucker, but you leave the door cracked so you can contemplate the wonders of spontaneous combustion. You realize, naturally, that spelling the word “combustion” at this time of day is a miracle in and of itself.

You appreciate thermolite-lined boots. Having cold feet is akin to having aching teeth. Nothing ruins a day so completely than either of these conditions. OK, well…maybe…throw in some aching sinuses. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum because there will also, undoubtedly, be a ball-buster headache singing second soprano in the foreground. Cause and effect is a curious thing.

You are thankful your brand, spankin’ Toyota 4Runner was built from the proverbial ground up in Japan and not in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Unless you’ve been living on the Moon recently, you’ve been inundated with news and revelations about the Toyota Mega Recall. And the millions of cars that have been recalled were all manufactured on our own sacred soil. Quelle domage, as the French say. Un-freakin-believable, as a friend of mine says!

Of course, then there is all this banter about Daylight Savings Time. I think the cosmos – which has been drifting around the vast expanse of space and time for millenia -- is getting a big belly laugh out of our human attempt to, dare I say it, “control” time. This annual turnaround is just prescribed behavior, much like “going to see the aspens turn” here on home turf during the fall. Salmon swim to the places they are born to spawn and die. That is genetic. Au contraire, the human species has been too busy working on some absurd playbook that prescribes forms of acceptable behavior. “Spring forward, fall back.” Uh-huh. Remember the old Doctor Pepper commercials? How about: “I’m a lemming, you’re a lemming, wouldn’t you like to be a lemming, too?”

I save thinking about the absurdities of our county government and special districts for daylight hours. But it does kinda make you wonder why our local Road and Bridge Department only plows our roads during election years!