Quick ramble of Wrong on a Thursday morning

I woke up all wrong this morning. I had dreamed so vividly about a volcano erupting near my childhood home that I could still feel the sweat marks beneath me. I can still remember the way one of the walls in my old bedroom fell down right before me, evaporating in the hellfire heat. But the walls made of cement, not from bricks, were still standing. Figures. Damn good cement, that stuff.
So I began running in and out with stuff, like my wallet, glasses, a toothbrush, some clothes, my laptop, and every little item that I would want to save from the furnace, but didn’t quite know where to put given our situation. We ran uphill to some other house where we hid out from looters (other than ourselves), and I seem to remember some talk about group sex here at the end of it all, but that’s when the alarm clock rang.

And so I was upright.
I rose from bed and was upright as well.

I fumbled together some coffee while listening to the radio and reading Slashdot news on my cell, before I headed to the bathroom for my morning toilette. I read about the American mustang in National Geographic and how it was treated as a pest by the locals in North America. I wiped myself, had a quick shower, got my clothes on, grabbed the garbage and ran for the bus stop.

That is, the second after I exited the door I immediately knew there was something terribly wrong. But I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I assumed there was some item I had forgot. Well, I won’t climb all those stairs for something I can bring tomorrow, and having my keys and my phone, I was sure to make it through the day. My trousers felt wrong. I pulled them up.

Dropped off the garbage like any other prisoner of love (read more) and went for the bus. The digital billboard that announces a quote unquote real time guesstimate of the next departure said 8 minutes in heartless gold. I cursed, lit a cigarette and turned to see the bus arrive. I cursed again, put out the cigarette and got inside. In the bus I was going over my dream when I noticed that one of the monitors were flickering. I shot a couple of videos proving that the bus company in Oslo use a version of Embedded Win XP (see #1 and #2) on each and every monitor they run. I wonder what kind of discount they got which makes it worth the hassle. The BIOS at bootup showed a 500Mhz processor with 256MB RAM.. Anyway. When I jumped off I was happy that I wouldn’t be as late for work as I had feared, and I smiled at the junkies gathered in the square. It’s too easy to remember when the buses are late and don’t arrive at all than when it actually works.

Walking through a park on the backside of where my brother works periodically, I began to hear a hollow sound like the horn of a great ship or the official bomb alarm which has been the same since the second world war. For some reason I began to imagine a great steampunk zeppeliner airship taking off to fight the Prussians, or a ship like the Titanic leaving the harbor with a great crowd to see it off on its maiden voyage. Something was definitely wrong about my trousers. I adjusted the long johns.

I saw a nice Muslim family dressed in some traditional regalia and I wondered whether the horn was calling them in for a meeting. They smiled at me, and I felt left out. It was weird though, but maybe the singing feller was on vacation to Mecca or something. Who knows.
I got in at work still feeling awkward and tried as best to avoid the attention of the early lunchers sitting in the cafeteria. With a cup of coffee in hand I headed for the elevator, and checked my ass in the mirror going upwards. There was nothing wrong there. I turned on the machines that were powered down and checked some e-mail while sipping my coffee. Soon I had to use the bathroom. I crossed the hallway, entered the john and locked the door behind me before pulling down my trousers.

I had put my boxers on back to front.

"Effin’ ‘ell!" I exclaimed before taking off my weary mountain boots, khaki trousers and long johns to adjust the damn underwear. I have no idea how I managed to put them on without noticing that the fly was carefully protecting my ass cheeks instead of the crown jewels of I. No wonder it’d felt weird.

Later that day the feeling of weirdness wouldn’t let go, and instead of working late I called it a day and met Lady C in the middle of Oslo. We decided to get a new friend for Babette, our gold fish, at the pet store. He looks healthy although he is still a bit skeptical of his new home and friends. I might call him Jack Kerouac, who was born on this day exactly 87 years ago, but I haven’t decided yet. Or maybe Giuliano de’ Medici, one of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s three sons. Either way, he’s a very fancy specimen, slightly bigger than Babette, and doesn’t have the apparent extremities of our late fish Fyodor. For dinner we had chicken salad, roasted wings and toasted ciabattas topped with honey and melted brie. Sounds weird doesn’t it? But it’s really good. Sometimes, weird is really good. I still wish it was Friday. Cya!