Someday Never Comes.
Source: FromOldBooks.org
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There have been more lightning bugs this year than I can remember seeing in a long time. Last night I walked through the yard and lost count of how many there were, each one drawing a distinct J shape in the air as they lit up the darkness. And yet I always feel guilty when I see them because I remember how many I sent to their deaths when I was a kid. Not that I wanted to—there were just some things I didn’t understand, mainly that if you put a bunch of lightning bugs in a jar and leave it next to your bed overnight it doesn’t matter how many holes you punch in the lid. Unless the holes are big enough for them to get out. It’s something I only did a few times but still I think I should have learned the lesson after the first time I woke up to find a jar full of tiny corpses on my bedside table. That also didn’t stop me from performing some pretty disturbing science experiments, like the time I put a lightning bug in the freezer for one minute. When I pulled it out it had stopped moving so I ran outside to the air conditioner and held the lightning bug under the hot blast of air. After a minute or so—I didn’t think to time this part of the experiment—it revived and flew up into the air. So I caught it again and took it back to the freezer for two minutes. Again the air conditioner was able to revive it, although I might have gotten the same result if I’d just left it on the warm ground. At three minutes it took much longer to revive and, sensing I was at a crossroads with one divide leading to a possible career as a serial killer, I let the lightning bug go off into the night, hopefully to find a partner.
April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.
Having read several articles about New Year’s Resolutions over the years I’ve been able to coalesce all that I’ve learned into the following recommendations:
Deleted Scenes From A Christmas Carol, found in the archives at The Charles Dickens Museum, Portsmouth. Scholars presume these sections were removed by Dickens himself to maintain economy of the story. The pages were also only recently transcribed thanks to radiographic analysis. Earlier reading was impossible due to the pages being heavily stained with port wine.
We don’t know how he came to life. Greg said he thought it might be the combination of the charcoal pieces and the sunglasses we stuck on him. There was the pipe too. It was just a stinky old corncob pipe I’d stolen from my brother Mike’s room. He didn’t need it anymore since he got a new glass bong. Anyway that didn’t make sense. Randy said it had to be the hat because when we put that on him that’s when he started talking. It was a round black hat with a flat top. I think I’d seen one like it in old pictures of magicians or something, except this one had some silver stuff around it, like a small belt. That still didn’t make any sense. How could a hat bring a snowman to life? Karen thought it might have been some kind of chemical reaction from the pesticides they use on the vacant lot where we built him, and I agreed with her that had to be what did it. There was just no other explanation. It’s not like he just suddenly jumped to life as soon as we put the stuff on him. No, the first thing he did was sort of lean forward and we thought maybe we’d stacked his body up too high and I thought the hat would fall off but it didn’t. Then he leaned back and then forward again. Then he started talking.
