Salt Free

Everything is bright grey.

Bright grey?, I wonder to myself as I look through the bars of my cell. Is there even such a color as bright grey?

And what am I doing in a cell? I have never been here before, I know that much.

I look around and I notice that it's not really a cell at all- it's an apartment, one of many inside this building. Nicely furnished, soft furniture in dark colors.

Through the bars and across what is probably a street I see another building, the facing wall has been removed; I am reminded of the bombed-out buildings of Baghdad or Beirut, but there is no rubble or jagged edges- it's as if the wall were never there in the first place.

Inside the neatly-partitioned apartments people are moving.

Look: There's a fat man shaving. He's nicked his lip and he's desperately trying to staunch the blood with bits of tissue paper...it works on the third or fourth try, but it's a bit undignified to look at. I laugh, but I hope no one else does- I hate shaving cuts.
Good luck, Fat Man, I think. Rub your belly, maybe you'll get your wish.

Look: There's a woman undressing. She's talking to someone in another room as she pulls a sweater off over her head. No bra.
She looks over at me and we make eye contact, which is odd, since I am staring at her breasts. Oh, of course.
She's got eyes in place of nipples.
I've seen this before and it's not nearly as frightening as it sounds.
Her left nipple winks at me. It's OK to look, it says.
I blush anyway.

Look: There's a family of four sitting at a table, two adults and two children of grade-school age.
They are waiting for someone to pass the salt. There's untasted food on their plates and I can feel it growing cold from here.
Pass the salt!
Nobody is moving, all four are waiting.

I look around some more. I could use some rubble right now- I'd like to throw a rock at the family and get their attention:

" You haven't even tasted your food yet! How do you know that it needs salt?"

Christ, I wonder how many perfectly good meals have gone to waste because some fool waited too long for salt that wasn't needed in the first place?

Behind me, a man speaks.

"Is this what you're looking for?"

It's my friend Scoe. He's got a book in his hand. Scoe has given me many books in the twenty years we have been friends and every one has been a winner. I bet he can help me out.

"Damn. I'm glad to see you. I need a good brick and I left mine in my other dream."

"Here."

He hands me the book, which has become a baseball. I take it from him and I'm pleased to find that I still remember my two-fingered pitcher's grip. Oh, yeah, this thing was made to be thrown.

I go into my wind-up and throw a perfect strike into the family's dining room but they are gone already and my effort is wasted. The ball bounces off the inside wall and rolls back towards me, falls off the edge.

I hear a splooshing sound. I look down and see that there is no street between the buildings, only slow-moving dark water.
I wonder if baseballs float?
I wait, watching to see if the ball bobs to the surface.

It doesn't.

"Hey, man, did you see that? That family. Where did they go? "

But Scoe is gone too, and gone with him are the fat man and the woman with the winking nipple.
I'm alone now.
Below me, the water is visibly rising, moving thickly.
It's only a few feet below floor level and it's black as pitch.
I laugh at my own horrible pun and wish that I hadn't thrown my baseball into the water.

I reach for the bars in front of me.
They are made of smoke and the motion of my hands blows them away.

I steel myself, reach down and extend a finger into the dark , roiling liquid which is now just a few inches below. I expect it to be blood, or even the ichor of some long-forgotten demon, but it's nothing but cool, clear water.

The darkness is due to depth, not pollution.

Ka-pap! Ka-pap!

That's the sound of a baseball bouncing off concrete.
It's behind me. Has Scoe returned ?

I turn.

It's not Scoe. It's the woman with the chest that stares back. She's wearing one of my t-shirts. Why be modest now?, I wonder without panic, the water is rising and we are going to either swim together or drown apart; in any case , clothes aren't gonna help.

She reads my mind and smiles. The shirt is gone but she's got a clean white sphere in her left hand, tossing it up and down, following it with one eye while the other three study me.

That's mine but it looks good in your hand.

More telepathy and another smile, this time accompanied by laughter and a single word.

"Catch."

Obligatory Cat Post

I imagine you've heard of the seemingly ever-widening Poison Pet Food Disaster. I am happy to report that my two cats are healthy and gluten-free.
I had a half-dozen recalled cans that I had just bought but hadn't used yet. I read about the recall at work and traded the cans in at my grocers instead of poisoning my cats. Being a web junkie paid off- I saw the news as it broke.
This is Wilkins, (below). She's named after NFL placekicker Jeff Wilkins, who kicked a field goal that won a bet for me on the same day I got the cat. My buddy Mike found her inside a box left in the parking lot at his work. She was a kitten then. Now she's almost thirteen. She was a good mouser in her younger days, but my current digs don't have mice so I put her to work as a music critic.

I clear the floor and cover it with a shallow layer of CDs. Wilkins then walks over to the heap, sniffs around a bit and pushes a few aside. If one is really good, she'll bat it across the room, safely away from what happens next.
Once she has made her selections, she perches herself above the remaining discs and hunkers down on her haunches as if to shit. I always toss her outside at this point, so I don't know if she would really carry through with her turding or if it is just a critic's gesture.
Her picks are usually pretty good, although I've noticed she's started picking discs containing rampant profanity, which I cannot play on-air. I think she's slacking up because she misses her giblets n' gravy canned food.

This is Opus, my Tuxedo Cat. I think he's about ten- I got him from the pound and he was pretty grown-up by then. He's the second dumbest cat I have ever owned, but he's also the sweetest. He already has a long-term kidney problem, so he doesn't have 'normal' food in his regular diet anyway -so he was pretty safe from the recalled food.
He likes to go out in the rain. He will stand at the door and meow until I let him out. Then he runs outside and hides under a shrubbery until it stops raining or he gets hungry, whichever comes first. As I said, he's not very smart.

The dumbest cat I had was a Persian named Oliver. He used to leap into our old clawfoot bathtub and then pretend he couldn't get out. The stupid fucker could snatch a hunk of thawing hamburger from the top of the refrigerator but couldn't get out of the tub.
One night I came home from work and found a raging party in progress . Someone had given Oliver a dish of cream and Kahlua and he was wasted...a jar of honey somehow got spilled on the kitchen floor and my poor stupid drunken cat rolled in the honey.
When I opened the front door , Oliver rushed past into the street behind me. His sticky fur had already started accumulating debris- a few bottle caps, a cigarette butt, a lighter...

I turned around and chased him into traffic- I was almost as drunk as the cat- and somehow managed to wrestle him inside.
By the time me and my roomie Chris got Oliver into the bathtub, he was covered in honey , trash and street grime. We donned thick, long-sleeved garments and tried to wash the poor cat in the tub, but Oliver really didn't take well to being scrubbed and soaped.

We only had one choice. I cut the largest bits of trash out of his long fur with a pair of scissors while Chris held him tightly, then two of us held the cat while Chris used electric shears to shave the wretched beast.
Oliver ran directly into my bedroom and hid under the bed. He refused to come out until his fur had grown back, which took several weeks.

That cat was one sour-ass roommate.