Callithump Thunderblog

I am going to dash off a very quick post. Like I have 10 minutes before I leave the house kind of post; many would not attempt such a thing, but I am going to dazzle you with an act of brilliance of such caliber that my commenting audience will accuse me of cheating. "This post reeks of hours upon hours of earnest effort and hard work too, coupled with a liberal dash of Edna consulting; so fine craftedly honed it is," they will cry.

Or maybe not.

Probably not. Stop getting your hopes up.

It's just a stupid blog post anyway. If you want fine writing go to the library or something.

Here we go. An on-the-go, off-the-cuff, drive-by post. Problem is, I am a slow writer. It wasn't always that way, however.

I used to be a slow choreographer.

I don't make dances anymore on account of in the post college real world you have to pay for rehearsal space by the hour and the usual rule of thumb which is going to sound super slow to all you uninitiated folks who have taken choreographers for granted your entire lives, is that it takes one hour to come up with one minute of material. For real. That is a long time. So, next time you watch the ending of The 40 Year Old Virgin, where they burst out into song and dance, the "Age of Aquarius" number, just think about that. For me it took longer. No. Not the 40 year thing. THAT didn't take quite that long. I was talking about choreography, remember? The rule of thumb?

I liked making dances. I could be all arty and weird and tell people to do things like FLAIL FASTER and EMBODY THE TREE and the pieces that I came up with were great to watch and fun to make. But if I did it now, if I had to hire dancers and hire a space to rehearse and a space to perform, I would pretty much be spending all my time and money on making dances. So I make writing instead. It is cheap. But it isn't fast for me either.

So, that just took me 2 hours. Sigh.

But what I really wanted to tell you is that the other night I was sleeping and it was great because it took me awhile to get to sleep so I was really happy and felt like I was doing a good job of it but then it was great no longer because I got awakened by my son, Everet, who woke me up by yelling

MOM!

And I pretended I didn't hear him.

And then he yelled another word

BAT!

And then my heart sank and I wished I could shrink down really small in my bed or make myself invisible by squinting my eyes up real tight. But no, I can't do any of that as I am the grown up. Being the grown up means that when my son, Everet, yells that there is a bat in the house, it is my job to get up and do something about it.

So, I pull myself out of bed. I go downstairs.

Everet has the situation well in hand.

He is wearing a pair of white evening gloves. ??? (Should I be worried?) He has goggles on. There is a shirt wrapped around his head, a scarf protecting his face and he is brandishing a PVC pipe. He looks crazed, in an insane cross-dressing bat-killing kind of way.

"What do you plan to do with that pipe?" I ask.

"Beat it to death."

"Put that down," I say.

We sneak around the downstairs real quiet-like, spying for the bat.

We find it hanging from a window sill trying to be all nonchalant, like, "I'm a bat and I am all wrapped up in my wings, hanging here upside down in my special bat way which makes me invisible so you can just move along because there is nothing to see here." And it was actually kinda cool in an Addam's Family kind of way and for a minute I wished I were right then and there having a Halloween party instead of doing what I usually do on Halloween which is turn out all the lights and hide in my bed, willing the trick-or-treat-ers to go away with my mind. My Halloween party guests would like the bat. "Very realistic," they would tell me.

We devise a plan. I hit the bat with a broom and the bat falls to the floor and then flies up and nose dives behind a pile of laundry while we shriek alot. After all the shrieking, we manage to trap the bat under a overturned basket.

Job well done. We congratulate ourselves.

Then the bat began to echo-locate which means it made creepy bat sounds and then it tried to escape by sticking its wing under the edge of the basket. More shrieking. Much more shrieking.

Did I tell you that bats freak me out? Apparently it is hereditary.

Anyhow, after we stopped shrieking, we managed to scoot the basket and bat all the way to the back door. Then we opened the door and kicked the bat and basket out, which made us feel all successful again until we realized that the basket had landed overturned on the bat, meaning that we were going to have to open the door and free the bat and then close the door real fast so that the bat didn't fly back in the house.

Yes, fly. They fly, people. That is what makes bats so freaky. The fly all erratically and swoop and I am pretty sure that they build nests in people's hair especially if their hair is naturally curly and beautify and shiny like mine is and if that happens you pretty much die of fright.

In the end, we watched the bat fly into the night sky and felt pretty good about the whole thing. No one died of fright. The bat wasn't harmed. And the whole ordeal took ten minutes or less.

It took me 2 hours to fall back to sleep.


And it took me 2 1/2 days to write this.


Happy Halloween.







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