It Gets Late Early

As Yogi said one time, “It gets late early now.”

A very wise man, that Yogi.

The darkness settles in and so do we.

Yogi didn’t say that one; I did.

I’m settled in right now, writing this in front of a nice warm fire, so there’s something cozy to be said about the early dark. It’s a time to shift into low gear and step away from the world for an extended night. Fix yourself a beverage—your choice—open a book, put up your feet and feel the day slip away.

Of course Z would say I only have a low gear and I don’t need any encouragement to engage in the above mentioned activities at any time of year.

But that’s just Z, the Shark, who finds it hard to relax for any length of time longer than 7 seconds.

At least the daylight hours, though short, have warmed a bit from where they'd been, so that’s a plus. Maybe it’s me, but 31 degrees seems a little harsh for early November mornings.  

I just came back from my afternoon walk a short while ago. I set out about 4:15 and ended up racing the sun all the way home. 

My afternoon walk is kind of lonely now because Z doesn’t get home in time to join me.  We start back in March, as soon as the clocks jump ahead, and for most of 8 months we saunter through the wooded neighborhoods, enjoy nature and talk. It’s actually the nicest part of the day and we both look forward to it. 

For Z, it’s a way to unwind from her long day at the hospital. For me, it’s a way to burn some calories so I can eat a bowl of ice cream later on. Oh…and to catch up on Z’s day as well.

There’s a lot of real life drama and intrigue that goes on in hospitals. I mean it is a place where matters of life and death are really matters of life and death. Not like in a regular office where changing the brand of non-dairy creamer is a matter of life and death. So Z gets frustrated with a lot of the goings on.

She’s a big patient advocate and if you’re ever sick and alone in the hospital, you want Z on your side.  So I usually get to hear all about it for 4 miles or so.

I have to admit, a lot of the stories get very technical so my mind will tend to drift every so often.  I’ll confuse a small fact or two like the man with the catheter and curly haired daughter with the woman with the chest tube and husband who lists to one side, and Z will complain that I’m not listening to a word she’s saying, which is very unfair.  I listen to all of the adjectives and most of the pronouns.  It’s just the nouns and verbs I have trouble with some time.

It's true, I was having some difficulty with the pop quizzes Z would administer towards the end of the week so I started carrying a small tape recorder concealed in my shorts. This way I could review the material the next day. 

It actually worked out great since my scores really began to trend up.  Sure, every now and then I would still confuse Sarcoidosis with Wegener's granulomatosis…but who doesn’t?

The worst part was when Z would finish talking about her very long, very hard day and then ask me about mine…smugly, I might add.

“Hey,” I would respond, perhaps a smidge defensively, “You don’t think these blogs write themselves, do you?”

I can’t really look her in the eye when I say that because the truth is, ever since about mid-June they have.

One day while I was Goggling something very different—it doesn’t matter what—I found this really cool computer on-line called U-Boob that will write anything you want it to; just like you would write it yourself.  Same voice, same tone, same style, same sensibility…same everything. 

All you need to do is submit a few samples of your work, fill out a psychological profile, which for some reason they send along to the FBI— at least they did mine—and “voila” the computer starts churning out blogs for you.

So cool….

Of course now the computer is spitting out this one and spilling the beans for some reason.  Kind of turning on itself, not to mention talking about itself in the third person, which is so annoying.

Why would it do that? 

Is it having some kind of psychotic break?

A crisis of identity?

Has the machine become man…or has man become machine???????

Why did Hostess stop making those 100 Calorie Lemon Cupcakes…..?

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Ah…the darkness.  It’s enough to make men mad.

No to mention women mad...at men….
 

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