jumpingfish

Don’t ask me where I was, but there was bombing going on, and there were drones in the sky with infrared scanners that could see you if you went outside. So I was hiding inside an empty house in an empty bedroom behind a door.

Trudy had left the day before. And she had take most of our things, so I was stranded without anything. Hiding from the bombers. From the drones.

I had been scrounging for stuff to sell, so that I might get something to eat. I had found three men’s suits somewhere, and they were hanging from the knob of the door that I was hiding behind.

A man walked into the bedroom. I tried to slink behind the door further, but it was pointless. He saw me. And he robbed me, taking the suits, leaving me in the room still hiding from the bombers and drones.

Now it turns out that the robber felt bad. He came back later and tried to explain that a friend of his was …  a former flight controller landlord of mine from my days in Houston. 

Now my son Ben is there. He is young. And we are hiding together in a closet. He’s been sick, and he throws up on the floor beside me. Three times. Quite vivid, this part of the dream was. And then I throw up on the floor twice and get up to find a wet towel, running across the parking lot to where someone is washing their car, evidently unconcerned about the bombers and drones.

And here is my father, come to take us home.

He has plane tickets for himself and Ben. I will return two days later… but no, I should get a ticket now and fly with them. But I need to pack my stereos, which I forgot to give to Trudy when she left. And I’m rushing to unplug them, because the plane leaves soon, and the plugs won’t come out of the wall. And anyway, what am I going to pack them in?

Suitcases! The two big suitcases that Trudy didn’t need when she left. I can pack the stereos in those! But where are they? Ben knows where they are. He’s grown, now. And he goes off to get the suitcases and I finally get everything disconnected and stacked up in the center of the otherwise empty room.

And then I begin to wonder what the use of packing the stereos is, because you can’t lock suitcases when you take the plane. They’ll likely get stolen. And in any event, TSA would likely be might suspicious of four stereos packed into a single bag.

And then I wake up.

She’s ingenious in how she mixes up the audience. How she gets everyone to know each other.

One of her techniques is to pass out names of famous couples and have everyone find their match. So for Bert there’s an Ernie somewhere in the room. For Ben there’s a Jerry. And so on.

She hands out the names, and the room is briefly in chaos as the group reorganizes itself into twosomes.

“And just in case we have an odd number of people,” she says, “I’ve got these.”

She holds up three names — not a famous couple but a famous triple. She holds the three names up in the air: Moe, Curly, Larry.

“I don’t get it,” one of the young women says.

Wow. Time does tick away, doesn’t it.

Oops. They pushed the wrong button. You’ve got to pity whoever it was.

You know that it wasn’t their fault per se. Sure, there was in fact a person whose finger pushed a button that sent out a warning that Armageddon was on its way. But it wasn’t their fault — in the sense of “How did the design of our system allow this to happen!?”

So we shouldn’t get so wound up about it, right? 

No. And yes. We should get wound up. Not to blame that poor soul. But to blame the system, the design of that doomsday announcing machine.

So it was just the system’s fault?

Yes. And no. There are, after all, people in charge of this stuff. People who document the procedures and make sure they work. People who design the buttons and make sure they work. People whose job is not only to make sure things work when they must but to make sure that things don’t work when they shouldn’t. There are people whose job is to get it right. And they didn’t. They didn’t do their job.

So it was the system’s fault, yes. But the designers clearly put too little thought into a pre-armageddon-announcment sanity check (say… a second person’s must concur, or a physical barrier to the real button that required both lifting and pushing, or…). 

So by all means, let’s not blame that poor soul whose finger was on the button. And by all means, let’s blame the system’s design. But most of all, let’s blame the dufus-clowns in charge of the end-to-end system who clearly paid insufficient time asking, “How do we make really, really, really sure that we don’t raise a false alarm?”

It was 2 degrees at the starting line, she told me this in a text this morning. 

I didn’t absorb it at first, and I responded with a sequence of messages about something going on in my world. But then it hit me, what they had done.

It was their first race. And it was cold. But… TWO DEGREES. I mean, like… whaaat!? I have run in the rain. And I have run in the cold. But two degrees? There’s only one digit in 2. Water freezes when it’s 30 degrees warmer than 2.

My feet are cold, and my fingers are cold just thinking about this. I can feel the sting on my nose and on my ears. I cannot get beyond thinking how cold they must have felt…

…as they crossed the finish line together!

Booyah, Jenny and Katherine!

Oh, it’s so good. I feel love.

Because it’s Friday night. In no small part because we spent the evening with people we like. And because Donna Summers is singing thru these speakers. And my brother and Vicki are due to arrive soon on the shores of Perth, Australia.

Although to be honest, I know nothing about Perth. So for all I know (in my ignorance on a Friday night of Donna Summers singing) there is no shore in Perth. But I assume there is a shore there. And I know that they’ll be getting off the plane soon, after 15+8 hours of flying, to 93F warm summer southern hemisphere days, having abandoned the negatives of northern hemisphere midwestern Chicago nights. Let me go look at the Google…

Boom ba dee dum. Boom ba dee doom. Triplet. Triplet. 

Perth. There it is. Kings Park. University of Western Australia. Zoom out. Zoom out.

Booyeembara Park. And… yep. There it is. Ocean. Lots of blue ocean. Zoom out. Zoom out.

Rottnest Island. Garden Island. More blue ocean. Zoom out. Zoom out.

Great Australian Bight. Adelaide. Kangaroo Island. Zoom out. Zoom out.

Tasmania!

93 degrees F. 

…

Have fun Ben and Vicki. And good luck, Lexi.

…

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