obfuscational hazard

Happy first day of winter, Monkey Keys. Before you even start, I fully realize it isn’t the winter solstice. It is, however, the first major snowfall of the year. That means it’s winter.

You all know what that means if you live in Michigan. If you happen to be my one fan in Florida though, I’ll sum it up for you. Winter is the closest thing to being on the moon we have in this country. Oh sure, the lack of gravity is fun at first. Then you jump too high and spin wildly out of control into a space deer. And the suit takes so long to put on! I mean, seriously, the helmet, boots, gloves, thermal underwear… so arduous. It is so cold out there too! If you take that suit off, you’ll die from cold before you die of the vacuum of space. Don’t get me started on how dry it is either. There’s like zero percent humidity on the moon all winter long. You had better bring astro-chap with you if you’re planning on drinking anything ever again. Then you try to start up your spaceship first thing in the morning, and you find out it is covered with ice. Where did the ice come from? The air is so dry that it just can’t be natural ice. Some space demon MUST have coated your ship with ice during the night. Oh no… no… it’s not starting! The battery must have died. The ship won’t start up. There’s no way to get home now! The lunar base just lost power too! That ice demon must have coated the power lines and broken them. Life support is failing. We’re all going to freeze to death in a cold vacuous desert! Nobody is getting out alive!

Nobody…

And that happens every year. You would think I would have moved by now, but apparently the Men in Black mind zappy my brain every May into believing the winter wasn’t too tedious.

Regardless, we’re back in the thick of it. The weather report said this may be the big one, and we’re all going to be buried under six inches of ice covered dust particles by the morning. That means my incentive to go anywhere has been abolished. The only problem is, I haven’t been shopping since the Cretaceous period. (See the end of an era for details as to why this is.) So my food stores are down to the typical sketchy noodle pouch and a can of corn. What’s a chilly Dilly to do?

It’s a long shot, I know. I realize I’ll have to traverse the worst of the storm to make it there as well. I’m giving myself a 33.3, repeating of course, percent chance of survival. If I pull this off though, the rewards will be astronomical. My shopping will be done prior to Thanksgiving. All the eleven-ty billion billion people going out to buy food for their feast will be isolated from me. I’ll take the Roast beast, and clean out the icebox in a flash. Why, my dear Monkey Keys, I’ll even get the last can of Who-hash.

Who-hash by the way is a great source of protein and keeps forever.

…Ah, who am I kidding. There’s no WAY I’m going out tonight. I’ll inform you all of my recipe anon. That is, if there IS an anon…

Hey Monkey Keys. It’s been a long while since we last spoke, and I must apologize for that.

“You’re darn right! You couldn’t have called? Do you know how worried I was? I was up all night just knitting. KNITTING! I failed home ec. for goodness sakes, and you’re managed to reduce me to knitting. Simply unbelievable, Dylan.”

…I’m sorry frightening Norman Bates Key. What did you knit anyway?

“Don’t you DARE change the subject. You’re not getting off with a slap on the wrist this time. I’m going to come up with some horrible punishment that is worse than the sting of a million bees that are on fire and wielding machetes. ENCHANTED machetes that harness the power of an area on the UV spectrum that has yet to be discovered!”

Hey now, don’t bring ROYGBIV into this. The argument is between you and me.

“These machetes are going to be ROYGBIVXLEXCALIBUR when I’m done with them!”

Alright, I said I was sorry. Seriously, what more do you want from me?

“I want a good story to make up for this, and maybe a milkshake.”

Ok, You will have yourself a story. You must understand that I live on a street where I’m by far the youngest denizen. The next closest person in age is roughly from the Age of Enlightenment. That automatically makes me the town nuisance by default. I could probably try to shake this image if I brought pies over to the neighbors more often, or stopped letting my ferocious felines tear up their flowers. I happen to like eating pies too much for the former to happen though, and I realistically have no control over the cats.

So, when my presence was graced by some neighbor ladies several months back, I was startled and confused. Were they here to collect my soul in some weird age defying contraption? Close. They had come to gather flowers from my plants.

I’m fairly obliging, so I led the ladies around and attempted to make small talk as I always do. It quickly became apparent to me, however, that they really couldn’t have cared less if I had been there with them, and asking my permission to collect the flowers was merely a necessity since they lacked the agile finesse required to cat burglar them from beneath my nose. (In reality, it wouldn’t have taken a Bilbo Baggins to swipe my flowers. The ladies probably could have come in with a bulldozer and taken out my front yard without me so much as batting an eyelash.) Regardless, I was now awkwardly hanging out with some people pulling flowers off my plants who seemed to have a secondary objective of pointing out things rudely.

“When are you going to trim your front bushes?” One inquired while pulling on a large yellow flower at the side of my house.

“I don’t know. I kind of like the way they look.”

“You HAVE to trim your bushes. So when are you?”

Suddenly I was frightened. Why did I HAVE to trim them? Were my bushes Audry 2 in disguise? Maybe they were lying in wait until they were big enough to devour my house. “I’ll look into it,” I said eying my burning bush with renewed fervor.

“Good, that will be nice to look at. These yellow ones are nice. Karen always took great care of them when she lived here.”

“They’re a little droopy now though, Agatha,” remarked the other one hovering behind me.

“Yes, you should water more often.” If I had a fire hose, I’d have been happy to oblige the two by watering the flowers right then. If I had happened to miss and hit the ladies with a million million pounds of water pressure I couldn’t be held responsible.

Finally, after what must have been 37.2 hours, we made it back to the front of my house. I was exhausted from the ordeal and was ready to make a b-line inside when one of them pointed out my onion growing four feet tall by the front door.

“Ohh, what is that?” One asked.

“It’s an onion some friends and I planted a while back.”

“No it’s not.” No? Now I was deeply confused. I seemed to remember planting it, but this crazy lady seemed pretty convinced I was wrong.

“No, it’s an onion,” I affirmed. “We just planted one from the grocery store.”

“That’s not an onion,” she repeated. “I don’t remember what they’re called, but they’re very expensive.”

“Oh yes, Agatha,” the other chimed in. “Quite pricey down at the farmer’s market.”

“I guarantee it’s just an onion,” I tried to reiterate. My agitation was growing, and I began to wonder if I could force feed one of them the bulb to prove my point.

“Well, it’s not,” smiled the leader. “Mind if we take some of the seeds from it to plant?”

“Be my guest,” I murmured as they painstakingly collected onion seeds. Most often, the fastest way to get rid of someone is to cave into their demands. It’s less bloody that way too. So the ladies said goodbye and scurried off into the night.

Perhaps when you reach a certain age being right all the time is more of a necessity than being cordial. Whatever the case, the joke is on them.

I’m not going to trim my bushes.