Wednesday Morning 3 A.M..

At three in the morning, your mind enjoys the freedom of unrestricted access to all the crooks and crannies of your brain and wanders wherever the heck it wants to wander.  Sometimes it will take on a jaunty ride through past memories, sometimes projecting itself into a future of happiness and bliss.  However, on occasion when it is feeling particularly nasty, it seeks out with  seemingly laser focus, those hidden negative thoughts and holds onto them like burrs on a wool sock.

When you are lying there, pretty well unprotected in your cozy bed, there is a certain level of trust that nothing will happen to you. You certainly don't expect something like a meteor to come crashing through your ceiling and squashing you like an ant. No, you feel safe... serene... cocooned in a warm blanket, silence all around and a soothing darkness to lull you to sleep. Well, sometimes you feel that way.

Just a while ago I was in a similar situation, in bed, a fluffy duvet keeping me toasty warm with the window cracked open a bit to let some fresh cool air in the room. The in-room humidifier was emitting a soft steady whirling sound and sending a stream of moisturized air into the room. My wife was softly breathing beside me and except for the fact I was awake at the aforementioned three a.m. everything was good. Yes, everything up to that point was good.  Then it happened.

I was just falling back to sleep when I thought I heard my wife murmur something. It certainly sounded like her voice. She has been known to talk in her sleep and even once I was awaken by her meowing like a cat.  But I love her, so you put up with that sort of thing every now and then.  Anyway, this time what she said was kind of inaudible, but I was pretty sure she said something.  I lay there straining my ears in the darkness wondering if I had just imagined the voice.

Then I heard it again. This time I was sure she said, "Ghill'em". "Ghill'em?" I repeated in my head. What the heck is ghill'em?  Then as I was trying to process this, out of the darkness I heard her again. This time slightly different but still sounding like my wife. It was more like, "Ghnow".

"Ghill'em ghnow"?  I rolled the words over and over again in my mind, changing the emphasis and the inflection.  Then suddenly, as if a light was switched on, I knew what she was saying wasn't "Ghill'em ghnow", it was "Kill him now!"

No doubt about it, she said kill him now!  What did I do that was so wrong? Sure, I haven't always been the perfect husband, but getting killed for that was a bit over the top, in my own personal opinion. Any prospect of sleep was gone now.  It is not an easy task to close your eyes with the thought that you might not ever open them again, especially if someone with murderous intent lying there not a foot away from you. I glanced to my side and in the darkness I could make out my wife seemingly sleeping, unmoving, breathing softly without even a mew emitting from her lips. 

Unsure of anything, I lay there,  my eyes clicking back and forth in their sockets, my body unmoving, but ready to evade any impending attack. As I sat pondering this situation, again out of the darkness I again heard, "Ghill'em ghnow".

I sat bolt upright in bed, my arms akimbo like an avenging Ninja. I may have let out a manly squeak or two, I'm still not sure.  And then again, "Ghill'em ghnow".  But from my new perspective of sitting upright, I found the sound came not from my wife's lips but from across the room. So using my three in the morning brain I quickly deduced it was one of two things; that either my wife had become an expert ventriloquist between the time she went to bed and three in the morning or there was a ghostly presence in the room. A ghostly presence with murderous thoughts. Surely these are the most reasonable explanations, what else could it be?

Of course, the idea that my wife's' voice as she slept was uncannily similar to the sound of the humidifier gurgling as air bubbles made their way into the reservoir didn't even register on my ragged mind. That didn't occur to me until hours later when my wife woke from her sleep and stumbled from bed to make her morning coffee. By then I was rather tired of sitting up with arms akimbo for the previous 3 hours. Six in the morning brain is a little more functional than the three in the morning brain. So it soon became clear to me that hearing the humidifier threatening me with murder when my wife wasn't even in the room might be the most logical of answers.

This isn't as rare, or as crazy as it sounds as many people can see the man in the moon where there are just shadows and light, or interpreting the lyrics of "Louie, Louie" as somewhat pornographic when they aren't or right down to detecting murderous thoughts from a humidifier impersonating your wife. But in case I do end up dead, you'll know it wasn't the heat that killed me, it was the humidity.

Stuff

I've got too much stuff.  It's funny that after years of a relentless pursuit in the acquisition of stuff, now all I want to do is get rid of it. The hang-up is, I just can't throw it away, it's good stuff, that's why I kept it in the first place. For sure, there is stuff that could go if I was a heartless human being. Children's' drawings, if you can call crayon scribbles on a 24" x 24'' piece of  kraft paper a drawing, is a prime example. These renderings haven't seen the light of day in decades, but yet, there they sit. Years of Mothers and Fathers Day hand crafted cards, notebooks from every year of public school and virtually anything that touched their hands have found their way into bins of untouched memories.  The matters only get worse when you have more than one child, in our case it was times three.  I once offered to return theses masterpieces to their creators but every one of them gave me that, 'you're not pawning them off on me' kind of glance. We did try and go through them once, but all that really accomplished was me getting all misty eyed. Not necessarily from the memories, but from the mould and dust that wafted up.

I am sure if I went back 50 years and told myself that the accumulation of stuff would become a problem in my later years, my response would be something like. "Old man, go back to the future. Can't you see I'm a carefree child of the 60's?"  I was not a very perceptive  kid back then, or now, for that matter.  But yes, the seeds of accumulating stuff were planted back then.  As an example, back in the sixties between my cousins and I, we had enough GI Joe's and related gear to fill far more than the 4 footlockers we already had.  We likely had enough troop compliments and associated equipment to serve as an actual battalion and even then, we didn't stop collecting.

I don't know why as young adults the acquisition of stuff was so important. But, it certainly seemed to be important at the time.  Perhaps it was a keeping up with the Jones' type of thing, or perhaps more likely, keeping ahead of the Jones'. "What do you mean, you don't have this stuff?" Of course, that was the era where your stuff defined who you were. Every young upward professional (affectionately known as yuppies) had to have this stuff.

To compound the problem, I am the type of person who infrequently loses things and rarely breaks things.  Even if something did break, I would think, 'well that is easy to repair. I'll just save it and fix it later'. I have a graveyard, or should I say a stuff infirmary, of slightly damaged goods piling up in the basement awaiting treatment.

As my wife never tires of pointing out, the same applies to the relentless game of keeping up with technology. Every time the latest and the greatest came out, the oldest and the lamest was delegated to the basement to begin its second career as a space occupier and dust collector. I have bins of tech stuff'; power cords, AC adapters of every possible output, floppy disks and hard drives with an astonishing capacity of 250 megabytes. The kind of things that you know, might come in handy someday. 

I wrote a story a while back, where the only technology that wasn't hackable or part of the internet of things, were all those old tech products that didn't have a backdoor built into them by the nefarious antagonist (not named Bill Gates) who felt if he could control all technology he could easily dominate the world.  The heroes of the day used all of those old computers and cell phones that were collecting dust in basements around the world  to win the day and save humanity.  Although, when I laid this scenario onto my ever skeptical wife as the reason for saving all this stuff, she was not very understanding or confident of my prognostic abilities.

If I went back in time once more to that same non-perceptive kid and asked him if he could believe that in 50 years, entrepreneurs would seize upon the populations need for accumulating stuff and would build a multi-billion dollar business from it.  To imagine that they would build utilitarian boxed buildings so people who had no room left at home for their stuff could load it all in a car or truck and move it to another place to store it. Then to top things off, people would actually pay somebody to let them save their stuff.  I am sure he wouldn't care, cause you know, he was 13 and wouldn't have a clue what an entrepreneur was and as was pointed out early, wasn't really perceptive enough to even care about things like that.

But even if an adult was asked the same question back then, I am sure they would have laughed in my face and pointed out that you can never have enough stuff.  As for paying someone to let you save stuff? Well, I'm sure they would fall back to the belief that a fool and his money would soon be parted.  Just looking at the number of storage buildings around the country today, I guess there are a lot of fools out there, me included.