When You Wake up at One in the Morning and It’s Still 2020
By: Sally R Simon
Tags: Hope, Random Thoughts, 2020, Depression, 2021

Image by snappygoat.com via creative commons

Do you know what happens when a ball of fire falls from the sky and hits a lake? If it’s seen by anyone, it will cause quite a stir on social media. Nonetheless, it will be extinguished. It may plop and sizzle and send up a veil of smoke, but it still goes out. It sinks to the bottom and there it stays.

It’s physics, a law of nature, common sense, and there’s nothing you can do about it even if you wanted to, by why would you want to?

Don’t try to fool me with your college-degree prose and your used-car-salesman smile. Not even new-age mumbo jumbo would work tonight. I have a headache. That may have worked with Eve, but I hail from Minneapolis* where we don’t take no shit.

We chew on people like you. Think a hunk of granddaddy’s tobacco, fresh from the pouch, masticated by pearly-white choppers, spit on the sidewalk without blinking an eye, and a lady with high heels wearing a fancy dress stopping to ask, “How’d a cow patty end up here?” Here being hell. There, you got the picture.

Life isn’t like that lottery commercial where the park ranger gets a scratch off from her boss but the wind blows it out the window and a deer picks it up and gives it to a raccoon who gives it to a squirrel who scurries to her door to return it leaving her there to pick it up and smile as Rocky runs away. In real life some redneck takes a shotgun to the fucker and blows his brains out all over the flowery settee on the porch of the log cabin leaving Bullwinkle without a partner and the park ranger in the psych ward for the better part of a year.

You think acid rain went away because it’s not in the news anymore? Don’t put your umbrella away just yet. And while you’re at it, I’d think twice about eating fish.

I burned sage in my new house, but the mice got in anyway. The point of entry was found behind the stove and plugged up tight. Resourceful fuckers nested in the roof of my car and rodent urine drips from my map light whenever I make a sharp turn. I guess I take some shit (well, piss) after all. Persistence is hard to mess with.

Do you know where Guam is located? I didn’t either until I watched a well-meaning-but-fairly-mediocre Netflix movie about “Operation Christmas Drop.” I take that back, it was actually pretty shitty, but it seems blasphemous to say that about an altruistic endeavor that far surpasses anything I’ve ever done. At least I learned something, even if it’s never going to come up at a dinner party or cocktails with friends because, like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Just to set the record straight, I lied. I’m not from Minneapolis but it sounded good at the time. I’m from a trailer park in South Jersey and spent my teenage years avoiding the label “white trash.” If you knew me, you’d be shocked, about the humble beginnings not the lying, because everyone lies, if they say they don’t they’re a liar. But that girl still lives in me somewhere, just like a fireball that falls from the sky and sinks to the bottom of a lake.

Only she had a dream last night and woke up this morning to say, “Fuck physics.” Her phoenix moment is coming in 2021. If you don’t believe it, just sit back and watch bitches.

*No offense to the inhabitants of Minneapolis.