⚡ October 20, 2017
What Begins With An F ⏰
It’s Friday, already! Sleeping all day really puts you on an express train for the week. No local stops at morning, noon, or night and now it’s Friday again. Programming note: in another week, the clocks will be set back an hour in most states, thus dooming us to the darker afternoons of winter. Every year I wish it were not so … but this is the first year that someone in a position to do something about it … Trump … might see his way clear to change this law by Executive Order. With a stroke of the pen. He’s just so crazy, it might work.
Meanwhile, there is much to do. Now, since I’ve committed wholeheartedly to write this blog every day, (Thanks, Hol!) (No, really. Thank you.) I want to avoid the inevitable burnout and crash by establishing a fallback topic for the days of the week. Both Twitter and Facebook do these things, learning early on how important it is to impose some structure over the chaos. I will do the same thing, but I want to make it more of a mental challenge. It will have to be something dauntingly specific for it to be interesting.
For Friday, therefore, I will fallback on writing about something that begins with an F. What begins with F that I can honesty write about week after week after week? My mind blanks out the way it used to when Bill was driving the kids home from school and a mad pun contest would start up to my chagrin. Bombasts of wit would bounce off the windshield to the backseat and I am not fast enough at all. I also suck at Scrabble. So, let me go rut around in my old filing system and see what I’ve listed under the letter F. I will take me a moment or two because it’s upstairs and it’s still near enough to dawn to matter.
The F Words
Still haven’t gone upstairs. I was distracted by a sunbeam coming in from the kitchen windows and falling directly onto the arm of my comfy green leather couch. It’s a whole different house in the earliest morning light and I usually miss this little bit of fairy magic. I have to mend the very first rip in this very fine specimen of furniture, and since I’m also doing a Stitch A Day project which requires its own daily effort, I took it as a sign and a chance to stay seated a bit longer.
So, I will write on Fridays about furniture if there’s nothing more pressing to be said. I could write about how we acquired this fabulous couch right here, right now, but that would be too easy. Instead, I’ll give a taste of all the furniture-related topics I could access. There is the haunted painting frame that came from Venice, the many-drawered cabinet that was made new for trendy people in LA but which was assembled from really old wood by really poor farmers so that you’d think you were both helping the environment while showing off your cool taste … that cabinet has live creatures in it that have withstood crossing the oceans and cold storage for a year … and still they gnaw quietly year in, year out, invisibly. Obviously, I’ve taken the bureau apart and cleaned every back nook and cranny. That’s when I discovered that the primitive hardware on the drawers make the most amazing sounds when tapped.
Those sounds inspired a firm plot-point in the time-travel novel I was writing for a radio personality, and I’m grateful for that. Simple, clean hardware sounds are not to be dismissed. The creators of the first great game called Myst used a lead pipe and a toilet to make most of the evocative sounds you hear as you wander the watery islands looking for clues and getting thoroughly creeped out yet exhilarated within your own imagination. While playing Myst in 1994 and living at Tina Louise’s house, we were working on a book with the DEA and another about the murder at O.J. Simpson’s wife’s house. My imagination was going wild.
So, that bureau is weird, and this has been your first Furniture Friday. 🐔