What A Life!

 

I can’t believe 12 years have passed since I first began traversing the galaxy.  During that time, I have visited nine planets and, to be quite honest with you, it is beginning to take its toll.  I never realized just how much it showed until one morning when I was on my way out the door I glimpsed myself in the full-length mirror.  The person staring back was a complete stranger.  At some point in time or maybe gradually over a period of time, I don’t know which, I had metamorphosed into ….I’m not sure what I had become.  I moved to the mirror and studied the image.  After 10 minutes of intense scrutiny, I concluded that my appearance was not influenced by one of the alien cultures I had engaged, but more like I was a hodgepodge of all of them.  The fact is I looked a complete mess, but I had a meeting to attend and didn’t have time to --- I can’t say change because I didn’t want to risk looking worse than I did, which was realistically possible being I no longer had any idea what the hell I owned for clothes.

On the way to the meeting, I settled on being content with what I was wearing because I no longer had an interest in PBRT, better known as Physically Based Ray Tracing; a graphical interface program that was actually obsolete almost as quickly as it was developed.  ISAG, that is, InterSpace Advanced Graphics, the newest experts in the field, had developed IDI, Infinite Dimensional Imaging that was supposed to be the ultimate in designing digital graphics.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that one of the reasons I had lost my desire to be a part of the industry was the damn acronyms.  Everything had an acronym and when the technology changed, so did the acronym so I would have to spend hours looking things up so I could understand what the heck people were talking about.  It got to be so bad that at one point, I suffered with migraine headaches.  After countless sessions with medical experts, not to forget all the money it cost, they finally determined it was from the stress created by all the damn aggravation I went through trying to update my mind to the acronyms.  The amazing part of this dilemma was that they had no clue as to the source of the problem and would still be guessing if it had not been for the information I had supplied them with after my visit with Weezie.

Weezie is an old fortune teller who’s been reading palms out of her run-down shack for over one-hundred years or more.  Of course, that’s an exaggeration, or at least I think so.  Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter because she’s been around for a helluva lot of years and she has a steady flow of loyal patrons, all wanting to hear about their future.  So now you’re probably wondering if I’m one of those faithful customers desperately seeking to discover what nature holds in store for me.  I’m not.  I’ve been friends with Weezie from the moment I saved her from being beaten and robbed by thugs; so much for telling the future.

One night when all of the seekers where gone, Weezie and I sat at her wobbly table drinking the Balneuvien wine I had smuggled from the planet Balneuvia in the CatsPaw Galaxy and talking about the headaches some of her customers gave her with their repetitive questions.  I told her she didn’t know what a headache was until she had one of mine.  When she asked how often I got them, I blurted about as often as I had a new list to study.  Aha! That’s the same look she had on her face when she connected the dots.  That’s how I discovered the source of the migraines.  Well, I’d love to chat some more but Weezie and I polished off the Balneuvien Wine and I have to get another bottle.  I’ll catch up with you next time around.

Chelle Munroe©

September 12, 2013