I am my thoughts… I am time
Annuated on January 1, 2023.
Everything that exists is a thought created by me.
Without my thought, nothing exists—it is impossible.
I am my thoughts.
I am time.
Following the cold snap of yesterweek, a sudden and unexpected warm snap had now descended upon the land. Everything and everyone was confused. Flowers sprung from the ground like it was spring, bugs hatched in droves, and squirrels started unburying their furry little nuts. Humans, human–things, and man–squirrels wandered dazedly down to the beach in their winter jackets, not sure what to do next. No one could decide what was going on. Was it global heating? Global warming? Global cooling? Or just global confusing?
The silithicine creatures continued to hibernate in their caves. The heat couldn’t reach the things, they were so deep, so it hadn’t awakened them to come slithering out and wreak horror and havoc and hell on the world once again. The shadows of the streetlights remained calm, silent, safe. The shadows around my palatial abode remained equally quiet. No silithicine creatures lurked within them, waiting to leap out and kill any souls who passed. They waited. And I waited. Spring would arrive, snows would melt, and the silithicine creatures would stir. But not yet. Not today. Not today.
Today, serenity blanketed the world atop the thermometery confusion. But it wasn’t always this way.
Tuesday night brought a raft of new night terrors: A dream wherein I found half a worm in my apple and half a horse in my oven. The other half was nowhere to be found, and in my frantic search for it throughout my palatial abode—who wants two halves of a horse secretly stowed away in their house?—I found half a cow in my toilet, half a zebra in my drive-in closet (gnawed to mush by razor-toothed geese), and the other half of the worm firmly ensconced in my nose, which I had left on the dresser overnight.
Tuesday night, rather than serenity, it was terror blanketing the confusion. I hid deeper under my own blanket but it helped not at all. These piecemeal horrors were followed by an even more terrifying nightmare in which Chloë Moretz used my forehead as a footstool. (No wait, that’s not terrifying at all.)
The calendar flopped over from 2022 to ’23 at precisely 12:00:00.00 a.m. I clamped my eyelids shut and steeled myself to accept what was coming: With the abolition of the U.S. survey foot, I had become 0.043 891 287 thous shorter. I was no longer a six-foot-tall man–squirrel. I knew the squirrels would reject me and Becasue would probably leave me for a taller man.
At long last, I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes—first one, then the other two. I expected to be staring my doorknob right in the face or, even worse, my outlets, but I found with no small amount of relief that neither was the case. I glanced around, blinked thrice. Everything was at the same height it had been at 11:59:59.99 p.m. My outlets were still knee-high and my doorknobs were still perfectly aligned to strike me in the groin if I wasn’t perpetually careful. I didn’t need a ladder to reach the toilet and there was no risk I could be stomped underfoot by a Chloë Moretz now 43 times taller than me (which isn’t terrifying at all).
I grunted dubiously. Had I, all this time, misapprehended the magnitude of a thou? And if perchance I was wrong about something as simple as a unit of measure… what else am I yet wrong about? Were all these doorknobs really mine? Did I even have any toilets in my home? My whole world was now falling apart—nothing made sense anymore. How could I truly know anything now?
I retreated to the dark hole under my house (some call this my “basement”), curled into a fetal position, and refused to come out until Becasue threatened to slap me with all 93 pairs of sandals, one after the other.
On Thursday, it had again been Chloë using my head as a footstool—but then she abruptly transformed into a refrigerator shaped like Rory Calhoun.
Bolting from bed shrieking like a gelded clown, I ran upstairs to my computering room, then downstairs to my other computering room. (It seemed like an appropriate reaction at the time.) Both rooms were safe and still quite computery. While plucking my nose with a freshly minted zebra tweezer and calling down the worst imprecations upon the Psychlo-Catrists and the night terrors they visited upon my toroidal psyche, I logged onto my favorite antisocial network and started posting a lengthy screed about a chair upholstered in golf pants. But no one wanted to listen. My increasingly emphatic jeremiad slowly segued from that, to the heartbreak of toast cramps, to what bupkis keeps with the lint in the bottom of his pocket.
Night wore on, then morning, and still I screeded and screeded. After some quantity of hours, the situation became untenable, but fortunately I had eleven fingers, so I could grasp it easily. It took six goats and an aardvark to calm me down, but that zebra (and its tweezer) finally did.
The Bouillabaisse Boulevard Bulletin reported that Mayor Rhoodie’s plan to restart the economy would go into effect tomorrow: He planned to extend the week to nine days, like some ancient Roman emperor, and thereby make everyone work a full seven days a week. Phase II of this plan would add three new hours to the day, between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., and Phase III would redefine “lunch” from noon to 9 p.m., so the wage slaves no longer take lunch breaks during work hours.
I flapped, aghast—truly flabbergasted, I was. I even flabbled softly. Again I could not fathom how this maladjusted, purblind throttlebottom hoax of a “statesman” keeps finding himself reelected, but again I remembered: We all keep voting for him. I turned the page.
Joey “Rats” Rat-zinger is dead—died yesterday of old age. Old age and gnomes. I survived his numerous attempts to take me down to Hell with him. So far, I have survived it all. So far. So far. I turned the page.
There are tribes in Indonesia where if you keep your coat on in somebody’s house, the families go to war. I turned the page.
“They’re words… but they mean nothing in this order.” I turned the page.
There were no more pages.
I am my thoughts.
I am time.
A refrigerator sat on a ledge, threatening to jump. It wasn’t shaped like Rory Calhoun this time, nor Chloë Moretz. It just looked like a refrigerator—a 1978 Frigidaire, to be precise, the top of its line in its day—state of the art. But here, 45 years later, it was a rusty shell of its former self, washed up, and obsolete. Its ice maker couldn’t make ice. Its compressor had nothing to compress. It couldn’t even make those little piddling noises when it went into defrosting mode anymore.
I stood beneath the ledge, desperately trying to talk the fridge down. It wouldn’t budge—its frigid little mind was made up. It leaned forward. Its door swung open; bottles of catsup, mustard, and a litany of other condiments tumbled out. Gravity was in a sour mood: There would be no mercy, no suspension of the laws of physics this day. The fridge plunged. As that first bottle of catsup smacked into my forehead, I woke up. Shrieking like a gelded clown.
And then I remembered:
Everything that exists is a thought created by me.
Without my thought, nothing exists—it is impossible.
I am my thoughts.
I am time.
Becasue and I rang in the new year last night with another gargantuan feast—no textual description would do it justice. There was soup. There were nuts. There was salad. There was slab upon slab of meat. There was slab upon slab of pasta, pizza, and rice. There was beef and veal. There was chicken and turkey. There was ham and pork. There was eel and weasel. Lastly, there was a single measle.
Then came dessert: Pies of every kind. Cakes of every size. Pastries in every color. Donuts of every dimension. There was even another fruitcake made by a woman with the initials “AEF.”
The gnomes were not invited. Becasue and I were adamant about that. It took thirty-four cans of Great Stuff™, but we sealed them all in, behind the wainscoting in the kitchen. Then we got down to noshing.
I’ve always wanted to win a lifetime supply of paper towels and toilet paper. But I never win that lottery. Instead, I must continue to buy roll after roll, only to throw each sheet away moments after using it . Life isn’t fair. I hate paper towels and toilet paper.
Ask Jesus if you want carpentry advice.
It was as easy as eatin’ pancakes. It was as easy as eatin’ fruitcakes. It was truly phlogistically fantastical.