Moving Day

“Before I sign, can you clarify something?” asked Keller.

The familiar-looking elderly man on screen did not comment one way or another, so Keller continued.

 

“I’ve signed non-disclosures before, usually a couple of pages. This is a book. The phrase ‘consequences up to and resulting in your termination’ strikes me as a bit ominous given the context.” He looked up for a response, a clue.

 

The old man smiled slightly and leaned toward whatever camera was filming him.

 

“You’re right to read between the lines. I once asked the same question. The job you’ve applied for has an arms-length interest from our government. It is important work, but they maintain plausible deniability. You said you want to make a difference in the world? Everything we do here has the potential to be life-changing.” 

 

“Or life ending?” Keller probed, raising his eyebrows.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.

 

I Can’t Fly but I Can Float

Old people need new experiences to prevent mental atrophy. And well into a pandemic we’re fairly certain that our bodies are taking a hit while we continue to binge-watch streaming television series that everyone is recommending. If you’ve gotten really good at Words With Friends, move on–you’ve simply entered a new comfort zone.

As old people (note to peers, we’re old, get over it) we no longer need “stuff” for our birthdays, so we try to come up with experiential gifts. Thus it was with a mix of excitement and apprehension that we entered a new spa in Port Charlotte for an hour in an isolation tank at 11am on my birthday.

If you’re a movie fan like me you no doubt remember the 1980 film Altered States. In that story an anthropologist mixes hallucinogens with isolation tanks for a mind and body journey that had serious ramifications. Expand your mind too much and it may pop.

The float tank pictured above was the one I used. Thankfully there is no latching top that closes over you. That would induce claustrophobia in the best of us. Before I go further, let’s just clear a couple of elephants out of the room.

I was naked.

I was not doing drugs.

There, now I can describe the experience without the distraction of nagging questions. Of course, I’ve also created a mental image for you that you just can’t unthink.

The tank is large but shallow. Only about ten inches of body temperature water fill what is essentially a large hot tub. The tub has underwater lighting that can be dialed from blue to other colors. A laser light projector like the ones you see at Christmas sprinkling stars all over the fronts of houses can be set to produce a variety of light shows on the ceiling. And you’re never really alone in the room because everyone’s friend Alexa is playing the kind of music you only hear when getting a massage.

We were instructed to take a quick shower in the adjoining room (to wash off oils) and get in the tub, preferably in “cactus” position. That’s the sort of arms up and to the side Egyptian hieroglyph that you may remember indicates a prehistoric field goal. In other words, let your limbs float naturally away from your body. Well, I can’t get my arms to do that in water, in air or up against a wall. It’s a serious flexibility issue that I’ve tried to correct with stretching and yoga to no avail. So I just went with the Day The Earth Stood Still robot stance. Klaatu Barada Nikto and all that.

I wondered how I could possibly float in ten inches of water. I'm not a small person. At six foot one and somewhat above my recommended body mass index I assumed I would be resting on the bottom of the tub. Putting this indelicately, I’m a ten pound pickle trying to float in a two pound jar of brine. But I guess a thousand pounds of magnesium sulfate rich Epsom salts is a lot more buoyant than pickle juice. It worked!

If you recall your first massage, it takes a while to relax into the session. Your arms never quite dangle completely, your shoulders and neck tense up while you try to breath through a linen-lined hole, and never mind you’re naked and covered with a sheet in a room with a stranger. It’s the same thing here. The laser lights were distracting but fun. The music was all wrong, so I said, “Alexa, play Shadowfax Radio.” If you’ve never tried that Amazon station, give it a whirl, but not while you’re driving a car. This is serious New Age Ambient audio Valium. I immediately got up out of the pickle juice and turned off the laser and room lights, but not before a drop of liquid splashed in my eye. Fortunately the Soakmistress had pointed out a spray bottle with plain water and a small face cloth. A wipe of my eye and a few tears later and I returned to horizontal.

Being the curious type, I experimented with floating from side to side and end to end within the tank. I also submerged my arms to see how quickly they’d resurface. Boink, there they were! The blue light in the tub illuminated the whole room, which I found somewhat distracting. I also started obsessing about relaxing myself to death and how long it would take the owners to discover if a floater had become, well, a floater. I turned off the underwater high beam. That’s when I noticed that Alexa has a pulsing light, so I closed my eyes.

Did you know you can hear your heartbeat in your ears when you’re head is halfway under water? It’s kind of rhythmic and soothing, unless you have Afib.

So now I’m getting into my float. “Alexa, what time is it?” I whispered.

            “It is eleven thirty seven. Have a nice Friday,” she said, and then,

            “I noticed you whispered. Would you like to enter whisper mode?”

Clearly, I am one easily distracted, wound up dude. I told her no, and to lower the volume.

Now that I was aware I had only twenty-three minutes left, I needed to hurry up and relax. Let the inner light show begin. Commence my mind expansion, darn it. It’s not like I hoped to get in touch with my pre-hominin genetic memories or morph into a protoplasmic blob, but a touch of nirvana would be cool. That’s when I noticed that salt was crystallizing on the tops of my thighs and some of the lights I had turned off were really heat lamps that were no longer preventing an air conditioned chill above the warm water.

We showered and met for a cup of delicious lavender-infused iced tea in the very capable and cute adjoining cafe that serves up a variety of organic and healthy items. We looked over the menu of services and agreed that we should consider a membership and try some of the other healing offerings for mind and body including salt therapy, yoga, and massage. The entire experience was very upscale and unique for our area. We agreed that our next float would be instantly rejuvenating and are looking forward to another visit. If you're a first-timer, benefit from my shared thoughts and allow yourself to adjust immediately to this intensely relaxing hour. You may just fall asleep, but rest assured there is no danger of accidentally turning over. I already thought of that.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.

 

I Have Your Password

Something about an email sitting in my spam folder got my attention. I generally do a quick review of that folder’s contents on the chance that my email program deposited a legitimate message there. This one was from Thomas Johnson.

The message had the feel of a “Nigerian prince” scam, a lame attempt to get the targeted recipient to transfer large sums of money. If you’ve seen those messages, by now you recognize the broken English and comical structure of the request.

The email went something like this:

            “Not one person has paid me to check about you.”

Well, good, this was entirely random. No one paid to have me blackmailed.

He (or she) went on to explain that my entire contact list had been acquired and that if I didn’t comply with his request, embarrassing information would be sent to everyone I know.

Not a problem. I regularly embarrass myself in front of friends.

            “Best solution would be to pay me $1007. You'll make the payment via Bitcoin.
            You could go on your life like this never happened and you will not ever hear back again from me.”

At this point buddy, I’m going to “go on my life” and keep the $1007.

            “I know xxxxxxxx is one of your password on day of hack.”

And that’s when things got chillingly creepy. The cited password was indeed mine. Granted, it was an old password, a simple one from back in the days when merchants didn’t recommend, or insist, that you come up with a unique combination of letters, numbers and special characters. It was one that I used for local restaurants or random clothing websites where I didn’t store credit card information.

What had undoubtedly happened was that this person had purchased a list of hacked passwords and emails on the dark web. There have been numerous security breeches at major merchants during the past year. Even systems used by my former employer’s HR department have been compromised. We received two apologies from them accompanied by instructions for following up on the data loss with a year of free identity theft protection.

If you’re like me, you have lots of passwords. If you’re really like me you have them alphabetized and organized by category. After some cleanup and updating I have 200 active passwords. They are strong, unique, stored offline and changed periodically. They are also worth way more than $1007, which is just a really strange amount. So Thomas Johnson will have to seek his small fortune elsewhere, but it was a good reminder that there are bad actors out there, sitting at home just like us during the pandemic with plenty of time on their hands.

A related story came to my attention just hours before I wrote this. Someone who shall remain nameless was recently contacted by her grandson.

            “Hello Grandma, it’s Bobby”

Now, Bobby never calls this person “Grandma” and his voice sounded strange.

            “Oh, it didn’t sound like you Bobby.”

            “Yeah, I have a cold.”

“Bobby” went on to explain that the friend he was with got in an accident. When the police came they found drugs in the car and they had both been arrested. He needed $9000 to make bail and had been appointed a lawyer.”

            “Please promise you won’t tell my parents.”

By this point, both Bobby and a thoroughly convinced Grandma were sobbing to each other on the phone. The “lawyer” took over and explained the need for confidentiality due to the nature of the arrest. Grandma refused to keep this situation secret, and with that the call ended.

This is the classic grandparent scam that has sadly increased dramatically during the pandemic. As a recipient of AARP’s magazine, I’ve read repeatedly about this, and coincidentally an article was in the latest issue that arrived today.

Almost daily we hear 2020 referred to as “these challenging times” or some other such catchphrase. They are indeed.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.

 

 

 

 

Who You Calling Majestic?

I’ve been reading quite a bit of historical fiction and non-fiction lately. Although much of the content takes place within the aristocracy of the 1700s and 1800s, I was recently struck by a bit of royal tradition that has seeped into the Twenty-first Century virtually unscathed. There on our digital high definition television screen, streaming at bit and byte speeds unimagined just a few years ago stood an elderly lady dressed to the nines from her pink heels to her pink bonnet. A brief video captured her knighting of Captain Tom Moore, a one hundred year old World War II veteran who recently made the news for his fundraising efforts. My initial reaction was, “You mean they still do that?”

In case you missed the Captain Tom story, as his 100^th birthday approached he decided to walk one hundred times around his garden with a goal of raising 1000 British pounds. The effort went viral, with videos of him and his walker doing ten 27-yard laps per day and eventually raising over 32 million pounds for his chosen charity. It was cute and sad and worthy of celebrating.

Thus, he became Captain Sir Tom Moore on July 17^th during an investiture outside Windsor Castle when Her Royal Majesty, 94 year old Queen Elizabeth II tapped him gently on the shoulder with a sword that belonged to her father, His Royal Highness King George VI.

Let’s stop right there. “Her Royal Majesty?” “His Royal Highness?” This recent knighting was in the quadrangle outside of Windsor Castle. The Queen’s last name is Windsor, but this is not her house, valued at a mere $236 million, nor is the $5 billion Buckingham Palace. Those two properties are held in trust for use by the current Sovereign (monarch or supreme ruler.) Think of them as where she goes to the office. Her actual residences are Sandringham House ($65 million) and Balmoral Castle ($140 million.) This is the home she owns.

We can put all that aside, because there are a lot of wealthy people in the world who like to flaunt their riches, collect things, have huge staffs of people – servants – paid slaves. And they are used to this. They expect it. They have lived their lives with it. They hang out together and always have. I understand the imbalance at play within humanity. It’s unfortunate but evolutionarily capitalistic and often the result of imbalances of taxation, purchased power and fealty that have existed for centuries.

But really, it is the year 2020. Dare we disrespect Mrs. Windsor by calling her other than “Your Royal Majesty?” Is she so profoundly imbued with her own self worth that she looks in the mirror each day and takes herself that seriously? “Good morning, me, you’re looking majestic today. I think I’ll go tap a worthy subject on the shoulder with Daddy’s sword and add him to my collection.” Are they beyond self deprecating humor and the occasional riposte during supper, “Lord Henry, was that you or the dog? Oh har, har, flar, flumpf.” Or, "God save the ME!"

I need to re-read Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I’m sure he had a good satirical time with this. Titles like “Highness” and “Majesty” are just so pumped full of loftiness as to be absolutely absurd at any place or in any time. How does this continue? A lot of the people (subjects) seem to adore the tradition and can’t imagine it any other way.

It got me thinking. If each of us got to choose a title that we felt best represented us, what would it be? What would it reveal about us to those whom we expect to faithfully utter that moniker? But rather than speculate about that, what would we call our leaders? I think most of them have opened their political kimonos sufficiently during the past few years to give us some direction.

Some examples:

Your Insipid Ineffectiveness. 
His Unbrilliant Illuminance. 
Her Most Bituminous and Faltering Insufficience.

There might be a card game here, or at least material for a quick meme on Facebook. You know the ones: what would your royal title be – match your birth month on the left to a column on the right.

I’m just glad that we just call our leader Mr. President. Imagine trying to adapt to a new name every four years. And what if the people got to choose the title after about a year in office? Oh heavens, what if Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court or even the Electoral College got involved? President Bush might have simply been called Sir Hanging Chad.

 

Jestingly submitted for your consideration,

VC Larson, esquire

First Viscount of Larsony
Court Auburn, Royal Port of Charlotte

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.