Absurd? I love it.

Have you ever...

• Wadded up a piece of paper only to have it unwad before your eyes?

• Been in a public toilet and, while virtually standing on your head, tried to pull toilet paper off a new roll the size of a European cheese wheel? And then after it has spun around about 50 times as you tried to find its end, you find it to be pasted down? Before all your blood runs to your head, you claw at the paper trying to loosen a piece, and finally, you get a strip of paper, only to look down and see you have created a rat’s nest on the floor.

• Spent 10 minutes trying to choose a toothbrush from the 6,000 displayed?

• Purchased a bag of chips to snack on while driving, and then spent the next ten minutes tearing at the bag, biting it ,trying to pop it open, and then you did, it exploded all over you and the car?

• Needed scissors to open a package of scissors?

• Purchased cold cuts, salami and roast beef, cheeses, olives, to create an easy meal and then spent a half an hour getting into the packages?

• Gone into the grocery story grabbed a quart of half and half--same brand you got before--but when you got it home and actually read the label, you found it was “Non-fat half and half—with sugar and corn syrup?  What sort of an oxymoron is that?

Ain't life’s grand?

To show some contrast, when I was a kid we licked Santa stickers to paste our Christmas wrappings together. Cellophane tape existed, but for some reason, we didn’t have it. Oh, I just found, cellophane tape wasn’t invented by a Scott, but got its name from a slur because the inventor was stingy on his adhesive.

He rectified that. The name stuck.

Here I am making fun of our modern times, but think of this: when I was a kid a little girl next door had braces on both legs because she had been crippled by polio.

“When I’m worried and I can’t sleep, I count my blessings instead of sheep, and I fall asleep counting my blessings…”—Irving Berlin

Live long and prosper,

Joyce

P.S. 

On the home front: Two weeks ago I lamented that I needed 35,000 words to complete my manuscript The Girl on the Pier. My goal was 55,000 words. Not possible, I thought. Saturday I told my husband I needed 350 more words. Sunday, 108. Today, Monday, Viola’.  I hit 55,044.

The Girl the Pier is a love story.

The Girl on the Pier is a painting. A customer came to view it, and offered two million dollars to purchase it, however upon viewing the painting he said, “That’s not the painting. There is another.”

Sara ,the executrix, didn’t know another Girl on the Pier existed, but is determined to find it, and why would Mr. Ahmad offer two million for it?

Something was fishy.

The book wrote itself, I just put my fingers on the keys…

Now little bird, fly…

Read at Your Own Risk

A Fiction Story

Once upon a time, there was a civilization where one person could talk to another on the other side of the globe.

This civilization invented the wheel, a way for man to fly, they sent a man to the moon and brought him back safely.

They found a way to interpret ancient cultures and marveled over the remnants of these cultures. The found messages from their forefathers written into stone. The ancients knew true North, the circumference of the earth, and that elusive Pi.

This great civilization, eager to learn, and constantly investigating, found scrolls buried in the earth and they found a way to interpret them. Their forefathers gave them a nudge with a rock called the Rosetta stone that served as a translator from hieroglyphs carved into rocks to the written word.

Stones, rocks, buried scrolls, paintings with codes encrypted, that was how important it was to the forefathers to preserve knowledge for future generations.

The great civilization that can send words around the globe invented the steam engine, rocket fuel, solar energy, the printing press and books made accessible to everyone, not just the learned scholars.

They began to write their stories, as the ancients had done. They wrote down the scientific facts they had found, the diseases they had healed, their formulas, and construction plans.

They built libraries so they could share the knowledge. People read the books for education, fun, and entertainment. Schools taught from them, scholars studied them.

One day this civilization build the computer, and they so loved the computer they began to pour their knowledge into it. Soon, they found it was much simpler and much more accessible to use the computer as a storage tank.

Bookstores closed because people weren’t buying books anymore. Libraries weren’t heralded as the hallmark of study. Because books were cluttering their houses, people began giving them away, clearing them out, for now, they had the computer, and it only took up a couple feet of space.

And then one day a great surge of electricity fried the lines to all the computers…

And because people revered one book, it had been in homes for generations, and for a time the only one read, it was, again, the only one read…

But wait, the rocks are still there.