Farfetched?

“Lay down here on this couch. No need to be skeptical. For some reason this is called a psychiatrist couch; if I were you, I’d…but then, it is not my place think on your behalf. Remember, it is in reality, just a stuffed bench with a built-in head rest, nothing more, nothing less. Anyway, lie down and tell me why you look like the spice of life has left your menu. I’m a good listener, or so I’ve been told.”

She is like that, helpful. Sometimes too helpful. She is the kind of person who finishes sentences for complete strangers. It’s like she gets inside their heads and rearranges their thoughts to coincide with her own, or maybe it’s the other way round. I know she means well, doesn’t have a mean bone, as they say. It is just that when you are asked about what is bothering you, it is a personal matter. It is like hanging your laundry on the line for the neighborhood to see, at least in the neighborhoods where you can still do that sort of thing. Rules to keep us from offending others, offending ourselves, is a ploy as I see it, to homogenize our society. Take the lactose out, make us all vanilla in a way that leaves out all the imagination of chocolate, and strawberry bananas. I have no option but to question, where it will all end?

My mailman brings me armloads of catalogues I didn’t ask for. Mostly seed catalogues, some flyers about how if I don’t get this pre-emptive insurance, I will most likely end up driving a pumpkin. I would prefer a pumpkin actually to that heap I manage now. And then there is the invisible gidget that is coming across the airwaves to magically wipe out my existence, by refusing to believe who I am. My computer has the ability to talk back to me, and in a way that makes me feel like I’m two years old again and don’t believe in magic. I sometimes find myself crying, just to have something, I can control.

Then there is the weather. All TV and radio stations have dedicated programming to keep us informed as to the particulate matter in the air, the barometric pressure, humidity levels, and last but not least, the temperature. Normally I ignore most predictions, because they are predictions. When certainty becomes an actual prognostication, I will sign up, even go to church if necessary. But until that time, I find the weather to be another distraction that I could do without if it weren’t so necessary to life. But when was the last time the weather Gestapo’s spent time telling you what a gorgeous day it is, and how we should all quit our jobs, and simply go outside?

Headlines in the papers, “Mass Exodus as Sun Shines Eternal.” Perhaps a bit over the top, but then I’m not presently hurrying to the basement, and waiting for the rooms above me to be spirited away to Kansas. I fear the weather more than being murdered by Freddie Kruger or the Apocalypse.  It is this fear, especially with all the recent weather-related events that has caused me to be on this couch, readying myself to give confession to a priestess, who I know will only agree with my well-conceived notion of being driven to the confines of a mental facility, because of the apprehension one more snow flake or drop in the mercury scale will instill. 

Thirty-five degrees below zero. Not below the freezing point, that’s kid stuff; below zero. The cold that makes your eyes glaze over, your bones give up their calcium, and your hair scream in agony. And then on top of that, thermometer shock, the wind chill. Wind chill sounds like a computer game where you are chased by an invisible cloud that whispers sweet imaginary warnings from people who have frozen like popsicles, in the balmy zero range. It, however, is what someone believes what the weather feels like, to the skin. Ten below zero, is like thirty below zero if there is a twenty mile per hour wind. I appreciate the added facts; but does it really make a difference? 

I guess everything is so disturbing, because although abnormal, it is predicted to become the new normal, like viruses, and election cycles that never end. There is only so much furniture you can burn to stay warm, even when Bob’s Discount Furniture has a perpetual going out of business sale. 

So, as I lie her on this wanabe couch, I have decided I need to get away. Find an island paradise where the temperature remains eighty degrees year-round, and with a slight breeze to give the palm fronds something to do, and just enough humidity to keep my skin orchid petal soft. So I have reached a conundrum that only Saint Mary, or perhaps Christopher, the patron saint of crossings, can help me with; find my way out.

But then, I’ve forgotten about Sheila.

“I’m going to sit here behind you. Close your eyes and look, well, don’t look, just point you face towards the ceiling and relax. I am going to attempt to use, not only the power of persuasion which I have been taking a night class in, but the Yogi massage technique which was brought back to America from the highlands of Tibet by donkey, for the sole purpose of educating the masses on their ability to believe, whatever they wish to tell themselves.  

 But it works! Most days I feel like the queen of Sheba, or some such person. My point is, you can go where you need to, without leaving the confines of your own mind. Now tell me where you’d like to be?... Do you feel a draft in here?”    

At a certain point, what have you got to lose? I closed my eyes as she began to rub my temples with her slim fingers. My mind although aroused by the promiscuity of her fingers settled on the high plains of Ipso Facto, a mountainous area on Begone Island.  It is being used presently as a research facility, dedicated to the study of mosquito populations, and their mutatious capabilities after being exposed to the radioactive fallout from experiments conducted in the mid nineteen forties.

It is a beautiful Island. The mountains once again resemble skin irritations surrounded by hair follicles looking for the dull razor that had disrespected their purpose. Nevertheless it promotes hope, and the mean temperature is 80 degrees above, zero Fahrenheit. The inhabitants, which no longer exist, roam the eroding valleys in search of closure which had been promised them by the Nuremberg Trials of the early fifties, but never implemented. The spirits of the island claim it is easier to pass through the eye of a needle, than put a genie back into an imaginary bottle.

The sky was a deep strawberry red with splashes of fresh cream. Puddles of, "Pacific Vodka," created in 1945 during some confusion on how to divide Berlin, dotted the flashbang landscape. Palm trees made to resemble cell towers, now line the mountain ridges, an attempt at forgiveness no doubt. As I see what I know can only be in my mind, I fear to look further. 

Sheila’s fingers continue to embolden my thoughts of escape, but with less assurance than I had anticipated. I watched as the wings of a beast broke through the swirling red and cappuccino foam to emerge as a beacon from the past. I watch as it lay its egg at six thousand feet, as those in the cockpit cross their fingers and ask the sugar plum fairy for forgiveness for this obvious attempt to create peace, freedom, life, through death and chaos. 

The explosion erases the red, replacing it with an orange marmalade that erupts like a cancer into the sky and pretends to look for Alice in the vastness of the universe as it whistles a tune, speed rated at several hundreds of miles per hour. 

I am not used to violence, or the condoning of peace under such circumstances, so I open my eyes. The images on the ceiling disappear into stained crevices of the latest rain and the most recent earth quake. Sheila smiles at me as if we were friends. She has grown a mustache and is saluting a poster of W.C. Fields waving a callous goodbye to Mae West. The Marx Brothers peddle by on their latest invention, a steam driven bicycle built for the entire human race. The Three Stooges pop out of a clock and begin to keep time by hitting one another over the head with stuffed canaries, designed by the people that brought us an army knife. I feel life slipping away, as the cold whispers to me from under the door, “Things could be worse. You could live in North Dakota in a Tipi the army forgot to confiscate in its hurried attempt to get to the Mountain of Presidents in a Sister State, nearly its twin, but for the latitude.” 

I realized I was no longer dreaming but suffering from the lack of a permafrost tranquility that keeps my equilibrium from turning to mayonnaise, and begins to look for a sandwich in which to sleep.

“Are you alright?” Sheila says as she watches me put on her coat and slippers and push open the storm door. Two feet of snow flows from the step like suds from an irate washing machine, as the sound of engines overhead become unbearably brilliant. Sheila complains that I should return, unless I seek peace in hypothermia, in which case I was on my own, as she had to give advice at the hypoallergenic clinic down at the mall and had no time to humor my memories. 

I waved my final goodbye before waving, would become an obsession too difficult to break. I realized at that very moment that life, no matter how cold in reality, is not as detrimental to your health as a massage on an iridescent Pacific Island surrounded by water that is claimed to be, swimming pool green.