Dragging the people along for a ride

Ever looked at our planet?

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Lots of blue with some greens, browns and whites thrown in for contrast, is’nt it?

What about the pyramids of little creatures who tend to bond into tribes?

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Imaginary pyramids that intersect, a few so much larger than the others that they dominate many, many pyramids all at once (freely use your imagination here).

They blend, in other words.

The people at the top of the pyramid are constantly communicating pyramid-to-pyramid by the blended actions and opinions of their minions mixed into multiple pyramid intersections.

We may say that Obama, Hollande, Cameron and Putin are not talking to each other but there’s plenty of communication between their organisations, officially outside the public view.

That is why Mars decided to eliminate the pyramids and implement a peer-to-peer network, a meshing of independent nodes having full access to competitive data to reduce communication issues.

We’ll get back to that history lesson later.  Let’s show you what used to happen on the old home planet, via a demonstration.  Case in point: the proposed international military action in the geographical region of Earth called Syria.

Decisions were made months in advance at lower echelon levels of the pyramids but official announcements are designed to make it look like decisions are made in realtime news.

Watch and learn!

Can’t turn my brain off this morning

Maybe this will give me temporary reprieve so I can focus on a boring business plan:

I see now why the happy, dancing boy in me died Monday night — he was told that just having fun wasn’t enough; he had to be more aware of his dance partner, more adultlike, taking responsibility because he was just not that good of a leader in a lead/follow dance style — talk about a mood killer.  It so deflated my ego that I just couldn’t stand being on the dance floor last night, especially after having a complete stranger, who hadn’t danced in six months, tell me, “Oh, you must be a beginner.”  Yeah?  Well, thanks for the confidence booster.  Go tell your friends because our dance instructors have reminded us that girls talk and tell each other who the terrible dancers are.  My reputation is sealed.  In reality, I’ll never be that guy in my dreams who dances suavely with women.  I’ll go home now and let you find someone else to bring you back up to speed.  I don’t need this shit!  I remember now why I asked my wife to marry me — because she was never a game player, having never played the field, so she was a safe bet that she wouldn’t be comparing me to other guys because we knew each other more intimately than anyone else, having been penpals since we were twelve, me having told her more about myself than I had to other girls and she never once saying anything negative — no need to pretend because we knew neither one of us was athletically talented or gifted dancers.  Am I just chasing my tail?  Is it so obvious to others that I don’t need anything from them in return for their giving me their life stories to write about?  How many women have offered me sex/drugs/friendship in exchange for a poem, short story or novel where their personalities were fictionalised and then realised that their virtual portrait of them was more than sufficient to keep me going, sex/drugs/friendship too complicated for my simple needs?

Whew!  Thoughts of self are finally tiring out this morning.

Never giving up hope

In this moment, I recall the story of the children in an orphanage of wartorn Yugoslavia, before war broke up provinces into countries.

One boy had lived in a crib for the first few years of his life and no one taught him a language.

He had his own logical babble that included a few words he had picked up from overworked caregivers.

He had a broken arm, they said, because he beat on the crib walls to get any kind of attention he could, unceasingly, never giving up hope that someone would pay attention to him, having broken his arm before and seeing it gave him temporary attention.

They also said he was unadoptable because he was so far along in his formative years he was unlikely to appear and act normal enough to appeal to a young couple looking to raise a child of their own.

By now, that child is an adult, if he is still alive.

Does he still have hope?

What does he do?

Did he ever learn a useful communication system such as a formal, common language with which he can express himself to others?

If not, what goes through his thoughts?

What is his physical/emotional support system?

Does he understand the concept of having a reason to live?

Keep anyone, any living thing, in a cage long enough and normality is such a skewed condition compared to the rest of the world that making comparisons is unuseful.

How am I like that boy?  What walls hold me in but also provide a protection against my own naive actions in the bigger world?  What do I perceive as normal that is far from normal to most of the rest of our species or to large subcultures or even to the local, smaller subcultures around me?

Morning meditation time is over.  It’s after 8 a.m.  Time to work on my business plan, such that it is.

The Amish Pirate Clan

Shadowgrass scratched the middle of his back using one of his new appendages.

“Mom, tell me about our family.”

“Well, son, we’re descended from a secret branch of the Amish — the Amish Pirate Clan.”

“Really?  That’s sounds cool.”

“Let me tell you a story about them…”

God’s School of Medicine — “Change for a change”

I walk this planet as if I’m a visitor from outer space, surrounded by the nicest people who treat me as if I’m one of them so either I am or I am not.  We certainly seem to be from the same universe and share almost all of the same symbol sets (i.e., memories of similar social/mass media training).

I as this set of states of energy exchange energy states with other people in the form of body movements such as voiced symbol sets, facial expressions, torso/limb placement and electrochemical/heat interaction via handshakes, hugs and kisses.

Also via this blog.

When a feeling of familiarity seems to pull out of my core being, I cannot distinguish the difference between whether I am meeting someone for the first time, neither one of us having heard of or encountered the other, or whether we have heard through hearsay, second opinion, reputation or written/spoken fact about the other.

This afternoon, my wife and I attended a local “home improvement” fall home & garden show in the south exhibit hall at the Von Braun [Civic] Center.

We met a lot of the exhibitors and engaged in both humorous and informative conversations, starting with a guy who joked I must be the father of one of his fellow exhibitors and ending with the guys who plan to look at our roof for much-needed repair work.

In between were numerous insights and observations.

Toward the end of our tour of the show, we stopped at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System booth which advertised and sold home radon testing kits.

The person we met and talked with most was a woman named Patricia “Pastor Doc Pat” W. Smith.

Pat looked at my wife and me as if she knew who we were.  She felt something special about us that went beyond the need for a radon test kit.

If I didn’t know better, I would say that she had read my blog and knew something about me or had heard from someone who had read my blog; that or the fact I live my life the same way I write my blog so that I am truly the multifaceted crystal ball that takes light in, reflects/refracts it back in new patterns but all in accordance with who I am through-and-through.

She told us the following story about her life that she wants to share with the world, being a “retired” pastor of the AME Christian denomination and a PhD in cell biology:

  • Born in 1944 and raised in Jackson, Tennessee
  • Her father, a stockboy at a Kroger-type grocery store, sent all five of his kids to college, including Patricia
  • Patricia was sent by bus by her father to attend Knoxville College in 1962
  • Patricia graduated in 1967 and went to work at Oak Ridge National Labs testing the effects of chemicals on rodents, including the famous test that proved the white sweetener in the pink packages is carcinogenic and states so.
  • While she worked in Oak Ridge, she lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the old barracks where the original Oak Ridge nuclear bomb development employees lived.
  • Patricia often processed film slides in a darkroom where her boss, a Japanese man, would sneak in and scare her so she decided she couldn’t stay in that job, leaving in 1969 to get her master’s degree.
  • I can’t remember but she said she either got her master’s degree at Virginia Tech, where she stayed at Fox Ridge Apartment, or she got her PhD there.
  • Anyway, she moved to Florence in 1971 and worked for TVA, studying the effect of the hot nuclear plant effluent water on local wildlife, including a salamander.
  • She later attended seminary school and became an AME pastor, preaching for 17-1/2 years.
  • Her son was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first black/African-American baby born in the county hospital in over 25 years; he lives in Atlanta and is CEO of some aviation group associated with an Atlanta airport.
  • Her adopted son, from Cameroon, who still calls her Pastor Doc Mama, graduated from the University of North Alabama, lives in California and works in the computer industry.
  • Her daughter is married to a computer animator, also in California.
  • Patricia is working with her adopted son to launch a website dedicated to roving ministry she calls God’s School of Medicine, started in 1994, the website slated to go public next month.  The ministry is basically a place where people get to tell their life stories, sharing how they overcame adversity to get where they are so those who are in a dark place in their lives can see no matter how bad you’ve got it, you’ve got hope that someone like you has made it.
  • As part of her ministry, Patricia is going to share her own life story, where God told her simply “Change for a change.”  What does that mean?  Well, if you give a twenty-dollar bill for a three-dollar purchase, you roll the seventeen dollars you received as change into the receipt and put it into a container — bucket, jar, box, whatever.  You keep accumulating that change until you’re ready for change.  Get it?  She can tell you more about it on her website.
  • Meanwhile, she misses her church ministry.  A bishop told her that she has put enough effort into God’s School of Medicine that God may be giving her the message it’s time to go back to serving a church; in fact, the bishop has three churches, at least one in Walker County, that need her more than she knows.

Until tonight, I didn’t even know someone like Patricia existed, a seventy-year young woman whose father was a humble produce stocker at a grocery store, a black man in the upper South of the United States of America, put his daughter through college, who majored in cytology and got a job at ORNL in 1967 as an African-American research associate, going on to get her master’s degree and then her PhD.

Amazingly, her story almost parallels that of my father, whose father was an illiterate day labourer and grandfather a tin smith for the railroad, making sure my father stayed focused on completing his college degree and going to greater social heights than them.  My mother’s story is similar, graduated as valedictorian and got her master’s degree as daughter of a factory worker/farmer with a sixth-grade education.  The story of two women and one man, two white and one black/African-American.

Patricia asked for our prayers as she launches her website, twitter feed, and PayPal donation tithe system, meeting with the board of directors as they finalise plans to lease a building to house their God’s School of Ministry in all legal respects to “do as the Romans do” here on Earth, and then, after the website is live and the ministry growing, going back to preach in Walker County.

She told us there’s one message she wants to get out to everyone she knows, including the man who lives down the county road from her outside Florence, Alabama, a prominent Caucasian farmer in the community — he asked for her healing for his blood sickness (leukemia?) and she gave him some verses of the Bible to repeat as medicine, thanking Jesus for taking care of any side effects of the prescribed medication he takes three or four times a day:

No matter who you are or how old you are, DO SOMETHING! Don’t just sit there, feeling hopeless.  She’s living proof that no matter where you come from, you have hope to go somewhere else, if you just choose to do something, anything, about it, just as she has and she continues to do at almost 70 years of age, come next year.  And by doing something, you make changes that influence other people to get out of their hopelessness, changing themselves and so on.

Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart meet the Mad Hatter in the Victorian era

Historians have never paid attention to one fact: our history was written by our parents before we were born.

Their actions, just like ours for our children, set the stage for their direct descendants.

You must have a clear understanding of that solid principle, that unwritten immutable law of the universe, before going on with this story.

For you see, before they were born, two famous aviators met Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for a memorable fictional character whilst Queen Victoria reigned.

While the middle-class prudes proved their noble worth, the threesome of Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter went off on an adventure.

Ever had a three-wheeled vehicle in which all three wheels steered independently?  Most likely not.  Either one wheel turns and the other two point permanently in one direction, or two wheels turn in synch with each other and the third wheel points permanently in one direction.

So it was with our flyers and their eccentric co-conspirator who set out on an unpublished expedition.

Unpublished until now, that is.

Ground into a pulp and turned into a felt hat were the notes, diaries and maps used by the explorers.  It wasn’t until a new computer deciphering program was invented by a retired secret agent to ferret out the hidden codes in the city maps of foreign countries that the threads and fibers of the felt hat were pulled apart and reassembled in their original form.

The hat sat in a hat box as hats are wont to do, taking up space in the attic of one Hegrapevinucus Forvell, the famous daguerreotypist who had documented the lives of both the famous and notorious across two centuries.

M. H. Forvell died and left his fortune to a geographic feature named Pilot Knob in middle Tennessee, not far from Readyville, where his belongings were carted and stored in caves carved out of the rock.

Using an aeroplane-engined dirigible, Earhart navigated her two companions over the knob, spotting the secret caves one early dawn morning.

They tethered their lighter-than-air craft to an old pine tree and descended a rope ladder to the caves.

Stored in giant clay jars sealed with impenetrable tar and humongous glass jars sealed with water-resistant wax were the life’s work of Forvell.

Much of the information was repetitious — farm harvest records and stock market buys/sales/trades, for instance.

But one container held a series of inventions, some patented and some stamped “For My Eyes Only,” including one for converting printed paper or paper covered with handwriting into articles of clothing, wallpaper glue or, to the interest of M. Hatter, a felt top hat.

From then on, when one of the three had finished a logbook or diary, the Hatter would use Forvell’s secret formula to reconstitute the water-dissolved and shredded logbook or diary pages, forming hat shapes.

None of them was a more prolific writer than the other.  However, multiplying their output by three meant quite a few journals were filling up on a weekly basis, driving the Hatter mad with desire to create as many new styles of hats as he could — tall, skinny, fat, short, see-through, invisible, and everything in-between.

Eventually the Hatter ran out of ideas for new hats and the two pilots realised they needed to return to public life.

Before they did, their records show they had more fun in a short period of time than should be legal (and some of it wasn’t!).

While they were tethered to Pilot Knob, they overheard some old-timey mountain music, the good stuff, hypnotic, said to turn you inside out, stop the motion of the planets and move you and the world around you over to the parallel train track of alternate universes.

Little did they know that they had changed their timeline.

They also had inadvertently invented a new social period called Steampunk.

The song they heard that changed history?  Well, you already know what it is: “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” written so far back up in the hills, no one had heard of sheet music or sound recording devices, so no one knows exactly when the song was first created or by whom.

And by changing history, Lindbergh, Earhart and the Hatter changed everything, including the style of dancing the local people performed to their mountain music.

No longer did they buck or clog dance.  They started a new craze, a dance sensation called the Lindy Hop and their clothing style became the name of the new era — Steampunk.

To get back to that time, Guin and Lee adopted the Steampunk clothing style and started learning a Lindy Hop dance routine that would induce a hypnotic trance and send them out of one spacetime continuum into another.

They had also found some of Forvell’s writings and wanted to create their own electromechanical wonders based on Forvell’s notes scribbled on incomplete inventions.

But which would you rather read about — how Guin and Lee invented a new form of space travel or what Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter discovered but had told no one because it was so earth-shakingly stupendous?

Don’t answer flippantly.

The answer you receive will shift history again, maybe by only the slightest change but also maybe by large changes all jumbled up together.

Be willing to accept the changes your answer causes.

Alice may never return from Wonderland and you don’t want that, I can tell you!

A Guy What Takes His Time

A spider web fluttered in the sticky, hot summer afternoon breeze, covering the entrance to a tan plastic storage shed, its doors ajar, exposing the once dark and dingy cube, where spiders, centipedes, millipedes, roaches, and prehistoric creatures which vied for a small environmental niche scattered behind, out, above, below weak beams of sunlight cutting through the tree canopy.

The promises of a backyard writer’s shack — molded cardboard form tubes, roll of asphalt roofing, mylar insulation sheets, University of Tennessee stained plastic lampshade — lay piled up, flowing out of the shed like dried lava, caked mud holding the writer’s shack construction pieces together like a old jigsaw puzzle box lost in a flood.

A granddaddy longleg loped across the algae-covered driveway on which the shed sat.

The UPS delivery guy smiled as he, too, loped up the driveway, handing the homeowner a nondescript cardboard box and looking at the shed.  “You got your work cut out for you this afternoon, dontcha?”

Lee nodded.

Like a rubberband that had snapped, Lee was suddenly, suddenly, suddenly!!! pulled back from Mars, back from the latter part of the 21st century and dropped in the middle of 2013.

Lost were the android sheep that he and Shadowgrass had released into the wild moments before, sheep designed to eat Martian soil and convert it to edible protein for Lee, his family, his research team and the consumption-focused tourists.

Lee thanked the delivery man and cut open the box.

Two revolving camping lanterns with 30 LEDs each.

Oh yeah, his yard sculpture project he had abandoned decades ago.

Lee put his left hand on the garage doorframe, leaned to hold his balance and breathed deeply.

He felt the chipping paint through the nerves of his fingers and palm.  He wondered how many bacteria were transferring from the doorframe to his body through his sweaty hand.

How many hundreds of thousands?

How many million?

He heard, almost felt rather than sensed through his eardrums, a tune by the Squirrel Nut Zippers playing on a computer system inside the house.  Or was that the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies?  The Side Street Steppers?  Could just as easily be a 1940s big band or its modern equivalent.

He looked at the sky, clouds passing overhead, clouds he hadn’t seen on Mars.

Lee shuddered.

Despite the heat, he felt a chill.  He had lost 12 pounds in a week, the same amount he had lost in the previous eight months.

Something wasn’t right.

He stood up and walked over to the 1995 BMW 325i parked under a party tent for cover from dripping mimosa tree sap and black mold.

The distorted reflection in the car’s rear window pane told Lee he was who he thought he was back in 2013.

What about his older and wiser self?  What about his son and Martian wife?

He shook his head.

He walked through his memory of history from 2013 to his present time — the first major Martian expeditions, the failures, the successes, the need for constant fundraising to send resupply ships to Mars, salvaging crashed tourist ships for parts, resorting to cannibalism at one point…yep, all the memories were there.

Where was his wife?  Which one, for that matter?

Lee walked up steps inside the garage to the door that opened onto a back hallway.

Once inside, he looked down at the torn and tattered vinyl floor pieces covering what was left of a rotten wood subfloor.

Boxes and bags piled one on top of the other almost reached the ceiling.

He held up the cardboard box in his hand.  It matched the boxes in the piles.

Was it possible his set of states of energy was caught in some loop?

Time does not exist but could space be warped such that you could travel from one condition to another almost instantaneously which made you feel like you traveled through time?  A roller coaster that was really a Möbius strip of some sort?

He tried to open his thoughts to his subnodes on the ISSA NET network but only silence showed itself, tinged by the ringing of tinnitus that he thought he’d left behind many years before.

The woman walking her dog down the street did not seem to sense his presence inside the house.

A cat came wandering down the hall, its head turned sideways, meowing in a low guttural, nasally voice, “rarh.”

Lee felt a buzzing in his pocket.  He reached in and pulled out a thin slab.  Didn’t they used to call these smartphones?

He shook the slab and nothing happened.  He touched the flat surface and images appeared, including a flashing number indicating something wanted his attention.

“On screen.”  His voiced command did not change the image.  He touched the surface again and the number disappeared, showing a series of boxes that looked like the old voice bubbles full of text that accompanied newspaper cartoons.

The bubbles he could see indicated someone had addressed him and he had responded not more than a few minutes ago.

The smartphone dinged and another bubble appeared, the text showing a response to his response. “Yeah, you’re right.  That’s why Rigby danced in the showcase with me, because he wanted to get to know me better.”

A headache seemed to crawl out of Lee’s neck muscles and into his brain stem.

What was the matter with him?  What about the lab experiment that he and Guin had planned for later that day?  The genetically-modified plants they had nurtured to thrive in Martian sunlight were due to be harvested and analysed within a few hours, coordinated to occur in conjunction with a tourist visit to the greenhouses where every tourist was given the honour of helping the harvest and taking a leaf or stem home as a souvenir.

Lee tried to find a chair to sit on but every surface in the house seemed to be covered with more bags and boxes, envelopes, clothes and books.  Lots of books.

He sat on the edge of the sink.

A piece of paper seemed to fly out of the cardboard box in his hand and float to the kitchen floor.

Lee couldn’t read the writing from where he was sitting so he bent down to pick up the paper.

It was a receipt for the lanterns, dated 7/21/2065.

He stood up and searched for a calendar on the kitchen wall.  The first day not stricken through with a pen stripe was 8/22/2013.

Was today the 22nd of August in the year 2013?

The phone buzzed again, a new message appearing.  “And Jersey hasn’t danced with me in a month.  I still owe him lessons at the other studio.  He’s been so busy volunteering for charities and mountain biking that we haven’t had time for a lesson.  That means we can have our next lesson almost anytime.”

Dance lesson?  Why did he need a lesson?  He was already the ISSA Antigravity Sphere Dance Champion for the 22nd century.

Wait…what?  The 22nd century?  He was more confused than ever.  He was supposedly in 2013, he had a box shipped to him from the year 2065 and he was a dance champion sometime after the year 2100?

The phone buzzed.  He read the next message.  “If the song I picked out by the Squirrel Nut Zippers is okay, I’ll go ahead and work out the choreography for the middle and end of our showcase, if the beginning is still okay with you, too?”

Lee pressed a box on the surface which had the word “REPLY” written in it.  Several rows of alphabetic letters appeared inside tiny boxes.  He pressed the “O” and “K” buttons and remembered to press the “SEND” button afterward.

He heard a roaring sound and realised it was raining outside.

The cat meowed louder, walking in a figure-8 pattern inside and around the outside of Lee’s legs.

There was that roller coaster/Möbius strip shape again.

He placed the box and phone in the sink, then picked up the cat and rubbed its back, causing it to purr.  “What is your name, little kitty?  You were always a sweet guy, if I remember correctly.”  The cat stopped purring and struggled in Lee’s arms, trying to get out.  “Oh yeah, the one that didn’t like to be held.”  He set the cat down and looked at his feet.

He wore bright socks, mismatched, one with stripes and one with circles.

An old memory came back to him.  He was standing with his wife and Guin…but wasn’t Guin his…?  He let the thought drift on by, recalling the memory.

Guin stepped closer to him, talking into his ear, his wife feeling ignored and turning to Kross, a dance instructor a few feet away.  “I was wearing pink socks earlier tonight but decided not to wear them with these jazz practice shoes.”

They both looked down at Guin’s ankles while Lee’s wife, Karen, struck up a conversation with Kross about the four major spin moves she wanted to master before entering another competition or showcase.

The first time Lee had met Guin was two years before, at a picnic on the local Army base sponsored by the previous dance studio they attended.  Her skin was walnut brown and her personality exuded the confidence of a successful college student.  She had walked under the picnic pavilion and sat right next to Lee, her white camisole accentuating her dark skin, showing off the Celtic cross tattoo on her left shoulder blade and another tattoo on her lower back.

She had hinted about taking a walk around the woods not far from the pavilion and maybe having her boyfriend and their third-wheel friend coming along to take pictures.

Seated across from him at the picnic table, Lee’s wife wasn’t interested, plus there was a football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida football teams on the portable TV they brought.

Thus, Lee waved off the offer and stayed in the pavilion.

Looking down at Guin’s ankles in his newer memory, though, her ankles were white, her ankle and back tattoos clearly visible, as if she hadn’t been out in the sun for a long time.  Just like on Mars…hmm…

Guin shrugged her shoulders and lifted her legs in a kind of marching motion, a habit of hers that Lee imagined went with her nerdy/geeky teenage years, a pretty girl with tomboy tendencies that helped her out.

Like the time, she said the other day, when she was a freshman in the high school marching band and, after practice, the band supervisors had walked away, leaving the band members, cheerleaders and football players to perform their yearly hazing ritual during their orientation cookout at the local park.

Some of the band members had tried to pick up Guin to throw her in the lake but were unsuccessful.  Some of the football players were able to pick her up but by the time they tossed her into the water she had given one a black eye, another a bloody cheek and a third a hefty kick in the balls.  They respected her strength after that.

Lee looked up from Guin’s ankles to her eyes.  She raised her eyebrows and smiled, putting her hands on her hips.

He looked from her eyes to her hips and back up to her eyes.  “Did you used to wear contact lenses?”

“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact up until I was thrown in the lake.  One of the contact lenses actually spun around to the back of my eye and I haven’t worn any since.”

Karen turned to them and nodded.  “Yeah, and I bet that was back when the contact lenses were like pieces of glass.”

“Kinda.”

Karen nodded and returned to Kross, who was about to kid all of them about their talking too much and not practicing enough but he tossed his head and laughed, the proper satirically pretentious behaviour of a dance floor primadonna, getting the message across the same way.

Lee nodded his head at Guin’s hands on her hips.  “Like I said, you’ve lost your saddle bags.”

Karen spoke to both Kross and Guin.  “Don’t mind Lee.  He’s liable to say whatever’s on his mind.”

“That’s okay.  Rigby” — Guin saw Kross’ questioning look — “my boyfriend, or as the state of Alabama calls him, my common law husband.  He saw me walking up the stairs in front of him and told me I had a fat ass.  I told him I could pick up a lot more dancing if he wanted me to have smaller hips.  Or he could deal with it.”

They all laughed.

The cat kept meowing.  Lee opened the refrigerator door, found a plastic container of cream cheese, stuck his finger in and wiped a dollop on the Cornish Rex’s thin fur.

He was losing track of which contiguous string of memorable moments was real.

He walked around the house until he found the main bedroom, the bed free of boxes, thank goodness, and crawled under the covers.  Within a minute, two cats had curled up under the covers with him.

Lee could just barely hear the phone buzzing in the stainless steel kitchen sink as he fell asleep, a clap of thunder jarring his thoughts briefly.

He might wake up in time to go dancing.  Or he might wake up back on Mars.  Which century he’d wake up in didn’t seem to matter in his dreams.