Shoe Horns

The Commentary of the Month: january/february

SHOE HORNS

(shoe horn stories...fear them)

My guess is that the X-Files will never take a trip into the Dr. Who thing of time travel. It must be true that if I have been online for nearly 11 years, that I must be a trekker, X-phile, and Who-lette. Whatever. Geek tattoo aside, tripping merrily down memory lane can be like reliving a lottery win for some, or sitting through a slide show at Grandma Bollwoods' 56th wedding reunion. ho hum. I mean think about it...

Shows that have taken to step into past(ures) have included:

The Jetsons meets the Flintstones

The Twilight Zone (only about 560 times, though)

Amazing Stories

the Outer Limits

Star Trek (only about 560 times, though)

Gilligan's Island (remember Hamlet?) Hell, even Oprah...the list could go on for a few months, so let's digress.

Getting stoned apparently has the same effect as time travel. I state this only after a housewarming party gift of Brownies reminded me exactly of what I really had and had not enjoyed about that required rite of passage. Frank Zappa would have smacked me upside my strat, but, I, the drugfree goddess of goof, ingested the fruits of Jamaica. Ja, mon.

First of all, there was this flu thing I was battling. Losing fiercely to phlegm and fever. (nice visual) My hubenstein and I invited his band and a few folks over for our housewarming. I remember some of it. I think. Maybe.

Secondly, there are some foods in this world that have made it into my list of Gotta Have Its. The ambrosia of the gawds include: cheese ravioli, Godfather's pizza, brownies, lemon meringue pie, grapes, and of course, Bearitage table red which is the best damn merlot made. I shit thee not.

Excuses now in place, I found myself staring eye to eye with a dark brown piece of cakey like thing. Had one. Babbled, coughed. Had another. Walked around and socialized. Wolfed down a third. Damn these things were good.

The television was on. The brain cells were off. School House Rock was the visual fare. I began looking at the two people who were speaking and found myself thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if I am feeling stoned." I looked at them again and thought, "Hmm, I wonder if I am feeling stoned." After about five or six of these revelating moments, I made a firm conclusion that I may or may not have been.

Now there are those of you, cops to chefs, who may have a day to day experience in this. I do not. When I was a mere teeny-bopper. (bop free at the time) My Dad and Stepwitch..wife number....er... long time ago..had a dinner party. My Dad and his wife were telling the big story. Apparently, the night before, they had gone to a friend's house. Part of the night was spent in getting the step person to try pot. She was not one to easily laugh, hardly the Robin Williams fan, and if anything, found McNeil Lehrer to be the most amusing team. She kept asking what would happen to her. Then, after trying it out, she kept wondering what the big deal was.

Her friend said that anything anyone said would make her laugh. She didn't buy it. Until she heard the word "Shoe horn"....

I relived that dinner about 45 times. I asked Dean, if it was possible that I overdosed. I would look into people's eyes, and finish the conversation hours later. The one constant thought, "Hmm, I wonder if I'm feeling stoned", kept ringing in my head. I wondered if anyone else could see I was out of it. I wondered if anyone else could see that I saw I was out of it and wondered if they thought I was out of it. I wondered why everything was so damned funny.

The thing was, no matter what minute it was, I wasn't there for another 5 minutes. I could hear myself having conversations and didn't really know what was said for what seemed like hours but was only seconds.

After awhile it got more annoying than amusing. Then it got amusing again. The guests had all gone, and my husband was having me listen to classical music as I sat flopped out on our kitchen floor. Then it got annoying again.

Time travel. Waddling down the milkyway of the mind's eye. Clarity of mind is the doorway out, and I was scraping my nails off trying to find the knob. It took about three days to completely defogify. But, maybe you understand what I was talking about first hand, right now.

Look out behind you.

©2007 Cathe Jones