THIS JUST IN!

In the wee hours of Monday April 3, I was up listening to what my ideas had to say.  At 2:30 am, the power went off.  I turned on my portable radio.  The 24-hour news station, which updates news reports every half hour, would tell me why the power was out, and the area covered by the power outage—or so I thought.

I listened.  The lead news story was about the Toronto Blue Jays playing the Baltimore Orioles, on Monday afternoon, for the first game of the 2017 Season.  This is sports, but it was the lead news story.  The second news story was about who won at the Juno Awards on Sunday April 2.  This is entertainment, but it was the second news story.

I listened for the half hour and no news about the power failure.  I listened at 3:00 am and heard about the Blue Jays and Juno Awards, but no news about the power failure.  I fell asleep sometime after 3:30 not hearing any news about the power being out.

BOOM!

Well, it wasn’t exactly a boom that blasted me out of bed at 5:00 am.   It was the tumultuous sounds of electrical stuff coming back to life.  The radio was still on with the another newscast starting with its breaking-news music.

“This just in!  The power is out in the area bounded by Broadview to the west, O’Connor to the north, Main Street to the east and Danforth to the south . . .”

This just in two-and-a-half hours later?  I’m hearing breaking news about a power failure AFTER it is over?

“This just in!  Blogger blogs about a power failure that happened 6 days ago . . .”

A WRITING EXERCISE

I do not remember whether I read about this writing exercise,  whether someone told me about it, or it came from the voices in my head.  The point is to pick a word at random, and write about that word and the ideas it generates.

I fan the pages of a dictionary, and randomly select gas.  Since I am a seven-year-old trapped in a man’s body, I immediately think of farting.  (Snicker.  Snicker.)

 

We were not allowed to say “fart” in our house.  My mother did not like that word.  Instead of fart, we had to use the word “bop.”

“Ewwwww Mommy, Daddy did a bop!”

Mom said that “fart” was a bad word.  This caused some confusion because it wasn’t a bad word in my friends’ houses.  I thought bad words were universal.  Apparently not.

If Mom did not like the word fart, then you can imagine how she felt about shit, piss and fuck.  Taboo!  Taboo!  Taboo!

In my mother’s 80 years on this planet, I only heard her swear once.  She said “shit.”  I don’t remember what she said, but shit was in her sentence.  I was in my teens and had done something to anger her.  I remember feeling shocked and proud and the same time.  How shocking to hear Mom swear, and proud that I was the only who caused her to do so.  It only happened once.

My father never swore in front of us when we were young.  His restraint lessened as we got older.  He used shit, bullshit and goddamn occasionally.  The one he used all the time was “Jesus Christ!”  Dad was an atheist, but he certainly loved calling on the Lord.

Whenever Mom talked about Dad calling on the Lord, she said, “Your father said, ‘Cheese and rice.’ ”   She would use that euphemism, too, especially when she watched the Toronto Blue Jays lose a baseball game.

 

Now I stop and look back over what I have written.  Wow!  All that because I took a dictionary and randomly selected the word gas.