No offense intended to anyone who might've told me something incredible lately, but I've been sitting here wondering if I've become the clearing house for all things odd and interesting.
Like last night. I was in our (mechanic) shop sitting on a chair attempting to calculate just how many more hours it was going to take me to finish cleaning that monstrosity of a warehouse (and wishing that by just thinking of it it would commute my sentence of actually doing it). I heard a truck rattle into the lane and stop. After a few moments of inactivity on the truck's part, I obliged the driver by checking to see what he wanted.
Chickens. He wanted chickens. We have chickens, but none to spare. He assaulted me with some vocabulary I am not partial to, but my discomfort was lost on him as he meandered through some pretty far flung (and--- might I add---unrelated) topics. Hereby I learned that cancer is not caused, as some say, by GMOs in grains. No. It's caused by drinking water that has stood overnight in pipes. Toxic water he called it. Unsuspecting mothers mix this stuff with formula and give it to their innocent little babies. That's why, he opined, there are so many bald two year olds in hospitals getting chemo treatments. He has advised the National Cancer Institute about this, but they are hiding this information from you, ya'll.
There's more, but I'll leave that for now because it would be hard to tie in the stuff about parachute jumps to blow up bridges during the war, cows with milk fever, urinals, and corrupt local government officials. You had to be there really.
This is but one slice of life. I have an amazing swath of people and experiences in my life that I don't know if I could tell you about believably.
Another thing that has haunted my thoughts and literally kept me up at night is the idea presented to me by a friend that the Earth isn't, as I've always thought, spherical but flat.
We were driving down the road, heading off into the sunset, when my friend volunteered something about the supposed distance and size of the sun as opposed to what it really is. Huh? I'm not a science girl, but I was mentally scratching my head. What did she just say?
She told me more, and after she left I sat mesmerized at the keyboard for quite some time trying to make sense of it. Out of respect for my friend, I wanted to at least try to understand what she was trying to tell me.
Like I said, I am not a sciencey person (at all) but: my oh my. This is really a geocentric universe with a very small sun and a moon of an equivalent size, neither of which are hardly further away than California is from Ohio??? Have we been as duped by "them" as they (the other they....not to be confused by the evil "they") are saying? Oh have mercy. I might as well box up the science books I bought for my children and rid my kitchen wall of the maps that have been hanging there for years.
I feel like pulling a Vinnie Barbarino: "I'm so confused!!!"
I'm not really confused in the sense of not knowing what I believe or think. I'm baffled that the topic came up. I guess I thought "The Flat Earth Society" was sorta just a joke. It's all been an unexpected twist.
But back to the shop clean up thing I mentioned earlier. I have this whole big life staring at me in the face. I am having trouble keeping the kitchen floor swept, the customers all happy, and orchestrating huge building rearrangement projects. I wake up with a dread some days, my first waking thoughts going to whether I should first clear a spot in this building for that huge pile of stuff or should I start some other huge thing instead.....all the while realizing that none of the ginormous outside cleanup projects is laundry, dishes, and food for my children (all of which scream for my attention as well).
Life looms large. Then I have people randomly suggesting I might want to rethink drinking water and telling me the Earth is flat. I don't have time for the Earth to be flat. If it's just the way it's always been to me, I don't have to give it another thought. It can just keep turning and I can just keep doing what I was doing. I don't have to really know or care about Agartha or whatever else popped up while I was trying to get a rudimentary grasp of "flat earth" (because just googling "flat earth" doesn't just give you a strict set of factoids....no, you wind up hearing about secret diaries of dead men, spooky new worlds and conspiracies galore).
I really just don't want to be astonished with anything Earth stopping right now. Does that make sense? I want to just trudge to the house after a long day and cook supper. And eat it. And go to bed. And read bedtime stories to my children. And thoughtlessly drink of glass of water. One of these days I want to just be in the house and not have to trudge back to it after a long, hard day of doing all that "other" stuff.
Some day.....some day....
~Colleen
