Colonocopies to Fruit Flies

Writ on September 27th...

Ah. Keyboard buttons….my group of symbols to communicate gracefully or sloppily. Furiously or poetically. I miss writing. I really haven’t been doing enough of it lately. I think about it though. When I walk the neighborhood in the quiet dusk every evening, phrases dance together and intertwine, becoming sentences. Many times though, when I walk back into my house, with the frenetic energy of Times Square, the phrases let go of each other’s hands and scatter. Poof! Gone.

I should be working right now. I have the most valid hallpass through for why I’m not. Our internet is currently down. Again. This happens just about every day lately. I could catch up on some reading...I am of the personality to have a small stack of kindling that requires my reading it first before lighting it afire. The pressure of knowing the exact moment that our internet will kick back on and I can work again is slightly more than average. I need to check in with my cube peeps as soon as I can via email, having already sheepishly dialed my boss from my pre-paid cell phone.

I wonder why it is that when I sit down to write, my ideas have gone into an active game of Hide and Seek. They know that I am too lazy to seek them and like putting chilli in the toy box, it eventually rots, unfound. And yes, I’ve done that. When I was little I put chilli in my toy box and upon opening it much later found two (very large) bugs where the food was. I remember thinking that kidney beans transform into bugs and didn’t really ever eat chilli again. Although I do like kidney beans!

My mate is getting ready for another colonoscopy and is at the end of his patience level. He was doing rather well until having to call Comcast this morning. Now we sit in a cloud of him feeling bad that I’m not working because I’m driving him and am home instead of being in the office and me feeling bad that I asked him to call Comcast and see if they could just push that button that they always hit when they bring our stuff back on. They couldn’t this time so I managed to at least get Word open on my laptop.

I brought Tweenaling out this morning to the end of the driveway in my car to wait for the bus. I never let her just stand there. Too many news stories, too many attacks of the imagination for me to be ok with it. I realize that mine and my friend’s parents never coddled us so much. My mom had me driving my bike across town to park it at my friend’s house, then hop on the bus at her place. I was out of district and as long as I could get myself there, I could continue to go to school there. I was only 14.

I couldn’t imagine allowing this now. So we sit and wait at the end of the driveway, watching the sun change hues against the landscape, moment by moment. I rolled the window down today and called out the window “HELLO CROW!”. Within a minute, one of my winged friends came zooming in to land expectantly in a tree in front of us. They are always rewarded. I hopped out of the car, baggie of peanuts in hand and after some morning salutations, put down some goodies for him. As I was walking back to the car, he called to his clan. “HURRY THE HELL UP! PEANUTS, Y’ALL!!! WE HAVE PEANUTS! WHERE THE HECK ARE YOU GUYS THIS MORNING???!”

Or something like that.

Then we flipped back to the Vogue magazine that I keep in the car. We look through the photos together, me pointing out compliments to all the eye goodies. The sunglasses that would look good on Tweenaling, the guy wearing a long, gray skirt, pretty dresses. And of course, try to let her know that the purses she sees in here….they’re all untouchable. Why on earth would someone pay that much for a purse? I’d need a protective bag to put that purse IN so that it wouldn’t touch bathroom floors or the floor of anywhere.
*
The other day I’d noticed that there were little fruit flies inside of the bag of bread we had sitting out. There was some condensation and the bag next to it had no flies and was dry. I could swear they were bought at the same time but the mate says they were not. (I still think they were because bread molds fast around here and neither were moldy). I wondered how the flies got inside the bag. And why. They are usually all over the fruit. Why in the bread bag?
And because I can’t just throw stuff out…and obviously the mate can’t either because we both knew they were there, we waited. I did open the bag a couple of times to try and set some self-sacrificial flies free, but was not 100% successful. We waited. Eventually the timer went off – DING! MOLD! Finally! Mold means I can throw it out now. It is officially bad. The declaration of We Won’t Be Eating This For Sure has arrived. Only now I couldn’t just throw it out with the twistie tie on it. I opened the bag and placed it at the topmost part of the garbage. I gave enough space for anything to fly out. I felt better about this as whenever I’d throw something out, flies would fly out of the garbage when the top was lifted. I can’t kill things. I think it is this: if I left the bag tied, I would have sent those fruit flies to certain death. They would die in an evermoistening plastic bag in a bigger plastic garbage bag and eventually would just be within two bags, unceremoniously dead, in a dump.

However….if I open the bag, giving them the chance to try and make a change of what Seemed To Be, then the outcome is at the most, unknown. I did not knowingly trap them anymore. By opening the bag, wide and seeing them fly out of the garbage, I felt better knowing that while I didn’t know what would happen to them now, their fate was not necessarily going to be what I saw when the moldy bread went into the garbage bag.

I think too much.

But it’s a horrible waste of my conscience to mull over these things when I can do the easy thing and give the living a chance to find their intuitive way to survive.
Or maybe I could just be like other ‘normal’ people and not give it any thought at all. Just throw the bag out. No waste of the conscience budget on that one.