What's for dinner

I Believe I Can...

All too many mornings begin with this sad sad sight on my floor.
However, this morning marked the first time I noticed the label on the Kapla Blocks box behind him. What is most essential for this toy to learn: flying or falling? When will he learn what he needs to learn?

Put This In Your Pipe

From the diary of a nicotine fiend on the first day of his last attempt at quitting cigarettes, circa October 2007:

Whatever kind of cave dweller has the biggest brow, that is what I am convinced I look like today. Am I Neanderthal? Cro-Magnon? The feeling goes on right now and all through the day: eyes screwed back deep inside my head looking out from under the shadow of what feels like a big enormous sloping brow. All the weight on the top of my head has rolled itself up to the center of my frontal lobes. Every other part of my being is more a foggy memory; of something, I remember having once in what must have been good old days. Because of the disconnect from the rest of my self, typing this out feels like my fingers are being operated from a mechanical claw at the carnival, trying to pull free the really good prize at the bottom of the pile.

Sense of smell has improved remarkably, for such a short amount of time, a matter of hours -- though visiting the restroom across the hall has made me question how much I should relish this heightened awareness of the olfactory.

Strange Visitor

Black and white citizens from the silver screen in my childhood dreams huddle together under the towering shadows cast by the bright white sun on the skyscrapers of gray steel and stone. The huddled adults – all dressed up to go nowhere in Sunday suits and hats -- point up to something like always, with a look part fear and part wonder, at something strange they've never seen before.

They look up at something from beyond the light, or perhaps from the light itself. I cannot tell. I am the exception, the lone strange child of the scene. The adults look confused, despite their view of what the something is. It may be a bird or a plane.

In the sky there is music swirling up, up: a softly whooshing wind of harps segues into a thunder of trumpets heralding the sound of a tornado. Then, a cliché, without warning, there is silence and the gentle touch of a powerful hand on my tiny shoulder.

"Would you like to fly?" asks a voice as genuinely warm and friendly as the smile of the man with the question, the man who was neither bird nor plane but was most definitely the cause of the confusion. He is a mystery man to others, with many secrets to his name. I know his secrets. I know his name. I answer "Yes!"

We flew into the sky until I woke up with a smile, knowing that I had dreamt the dream before and I would dream it again.

I did not know how far the dream would take me because I did not know this friendly flying fellow was more than just a television character. I did not know there were also over twenty years of radio, movies, newspaper funny pages and, most of all, comic books, telling his tales.

His stories seemed already endless, like a dream, and stories are tales of things that can happen, possibilities of life. Perhaps that is why the huddled masses looked so long in wonder up in the sky. Possibilities in our lives, the belief that we have the power to make things happen if we try hard enough, is what gives us hope -- and with hope we all can fly like the strange visitor in my childhood dreams. Like Superman.