A Rain of Frogs

It has been far too long since I wrote anything resembling fiction on this blog. I miss it, and I am going to start again. But until then, there is fiction to be had on this blog. Maybe you’ve read them before, but it might be worth a click and a read to revisit.

It was a dark and stormy night…

• Loose Wheel
• The Butterfly and the Lamp *
• The Secret in the Well
• Star Star
• Golden Boy

* yes, this features prominently in lists of my past work. It is one of my favourite pieces of writing.

I was having one of the best sleeps of my life when the phone rang.

We had been out picking apples the day before. One after the other I was lifting the kids up onto my shoulders so that we could reach the nicest looking fruit on the higher-up branches.

The girl was easy, she’s light as a feather – maybe 60 pounds. She also has fantastic balance, making it really easy to hold her on my shoulders for extended periods of time. The boys, on the other hand, are heavy. Each is easily over 100 pounds, and though they have good balance, they lack the graceful movements of their little sister. But what they lacked in comfort they more than made up for in final altitude. My oldest was getting amazing looking apples from near the tops of the trees.

Eventually we have 30 pounds of apples – galas for eating, and macintoshes for cooking. It was a great way to spend an afternoon outside with the kids, and the apple crumble after dinner that night was a tasty tasty bonus.

But that was the day before yesterday. Yesterday was utterly uneventful – another great day with the kids. We walked, and played a bit. And ate apples. Lots of apples. We even sent some apples home with them.

The weekend had been physically tiring though. Sarah had been rock climbing and I was still tired from apple picking the day before, so we went to bed relatively early. Unusually for me, a frequent insomniac, I drifted off into a blissful slumber, one of the best sleeps of my life.

And then my cellphone rang. It was 2:40 am.

I jumped up to grab the phone. It seemed to me that anybody calling me at 2:40 in the morning was calling for a very serious reason, and it seemed very important that I get to it in time. The strains of my ringtone – 19-2000 by the Gorillaz – mocked me as I first stubbed my toe on the door frame of the bedroom, and them as I smacked my shoulder into the corner in the dining room. It stopped just as I picked up my RAZR.

I was totally jazzed on adrenaline by this point, of course. I took the phone with me and walked back to the bedroom. I figured if it were important, they would leave a message. When one hadn’t come after 5 minutes I lay my head down and tried to calm back down. My heart-rate slowed. My breathing relaxed. I started to drift off back to sleep.

BEEP!

My phone was letting me know that I had new voicemail. My heart was letting me know I was on the verge of a coronary event. I picked up the phone and checked my messages.

What I heard made me very angry. The configuration of my name means I am usually the very first person listed in people’s phone books. And every so often someone – through carelessness or drunkenness, will bump up against their phone in their pocket and accidentally dial my number.

I heard a conversation. Several people – two quiet and one very loud – were talking about almost unintelligible things. My mind could not build a model of their conversation. I had trouble finding individual words in the mush that poured out of the phone. Until quite suddenly, I heard something perfectly clear, perfectly understandable. And what I heard was so perfectly bizarre it kept me from a decent sleep for the rest of the night.

“Now, I’m not talking just any strippers. I’m talking about real, f*cking honest-to god SUNDAY strippers man.”

I have decided, ironically after much thought, that the problem with “western” society (by which i really mean North America) is that we think too much.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive. Americans have been accused of not being aware of anything outside their borders, and some of my experiences in the US certainly support that idea. But seriously, there are a lot of Americans I have met that are indistinguishable from Canadians in their liberalism, anti-Americanism and world view.

But I’m not talking about all that stuff. I’m talking about thinking too much. We over-think and over-analyze everything. We agonize over what to have to for breakfast. We contemplate whether to wear the green trousers or the blue as if it were important. We ponder the mysteries of our friends’ lives and develop complex solutions to their problems. We think and we think and we think and we think.

And not a damn lick of it makes us any happier.

So I propose we stop thinking quite so much. We should start living more in the moment, instead of constantly seeking to apply the past to the future. Relax. Enjoy life. Go for a bike ride. Pick up a guitar. Something.

99% of the crap we fill our minds with is just making us feel bad anyway. Maybe once we get all the garbage out of our minds we can start thinking about the things that really matter.

On June 3, 2004, the Spymac world changed.

It was a new era for Spymac users. For months a Spymac moderator named Zmai had been publicly championing Spymac’s committment to community while privately waging a battle with the Spymac administration. Zmai believed that outrageous services like “1GB email” were destroying the community values that had made Spymac the busiest, best Macintosh-related website available.

The administration disagreed, and Zmai staged a revolt by creating a new community website to fill the void left by the rapidy corporatizing Spymac.

On June 3, 2004, Mellaflusia was born.

Much has changed since then. Mellaflusia was conceived as a place for creative intercourse, but drama on the sideboards eventually took its toll on the population, and by this year only a fraction of the original membership were still regularly posting.

It was brought to my attention recently that Mellaflusia might benefit from a change of management. Like all revolutions, the momentum can only be maintained so long as the protagonists maintain their fire and fervour, otherwise they may become part of the problem. So I will distance myself, to give it a chance at growth.

On September 14, 2007, I have set the ‘flue free.

I have stepped down as an administrator of the site. Caerulea, long term co-administrator will now be responsible for all day-to-day operations of the site, as well as any future planning and feature implementation.

I will retain the name of the site, as well as the “frog” branding. I am a graphic designer by trade, and I created the name and branding. It is only fair I am able to keep this. Caerulea has registered a new name, theflue.org, to which I will redirect traffic to this site for a while.

The wheels of progress turn slowly, but they do turn. Two and a half years after leading the revolt from Spymac, I find myself stepping aside to let other minds run the new republic.

Nurture it, because it will live or die at your whim. While I may not participate much any more, I will be watching from the sidelines – watching to see how the burgeoning republic is getting on in its brave new world.

I wrote this ages ago, but only recently rediscovered it.

When I was little, I was given a digital clock.

Keep in mind this was the 1970’s, so “digital” back then meant the way the numbers were displayed, not the way the clock worked. The clock would display the time in standard 12-hour digital notation (it’s North America, after all) in two different sections, and every minute, the right-hand panel would flip from top to bottom and reveal the next minute. Every hour the left-hand one would flip to display the new hour. Imagine two tiny rolodexes, size by side.

It was a really ingenious system, basically requiring only two motorized parts – one to flip the minute panel and one to flip the hour. I remember when I got it, being so excited. I think it was the Christmas when I was five. I was totally and utterly amazed by this clock. I remember plugging it in, puzzling through the manual, and figuring out how to set the time.

That night, flush with pride, I lay in my bed staring at the clock. My room was illuminated by the warm orange glow of its light. It even had a radio, which i had set to a local AM radio station, and had set it to turn on at seven the next morning.

And so, as happens to all children, I got sleepy. In those days, I could fall asleep in an instant. And so, to sleep I went. And woke up one minute later when the sound of the right side panel flipping over crashed through my room as if someone had taken a hammer to the wall.

Eight sleepless hours later, sister and I traded clocks – she had received an old-style two-bell alarm clock that Christmas, and its red shell graced my bedside that night.

And that night, I lay in my bed. I didn’t stare at the clock – this one wasn’t illuminated by a luscious orange glow. And as happens to all children, I got sleepy.

Down into sleep I’d drift. CRACK! – back up into consciousness the tick of the second hand would bring me.

I bless the day true solid-state clocks, with their silent time display became the norm. If a tap is dripping in the washroom, even if its two floors away, I can hear the water hitting the porcelain.

I’m a very light sleeper. Five was too young to learn that.