Odd Thoughts: Once or twice clouds beat laziness

It happens to me once or twice every time around this time of year: I really can’t think of anything to write about.

Actually, to be more truthful, I just don’t feel like writing about anything.

Heck, I can be even more truthful than that: I don’t really feel like doing anything at all.

Actually, that’s not true, either.

There is something that I’d love to be doing right now.

There’s blue sky outside of my office window.

And there are just enough billowy white clouds floating around the edges, towards Vancouver, to make me wish I could lie out in the backyard in one of those “zero gravity” chairs that Donna and I bought a few years back, and count them.

There’s one out there, hanging somewhat off to the northwest, that kinda looks like a giant freshly hatched chick, with a (relatively) tiny, crooked featherless wing sticking up and out of one side and a much-too-big-for-its-size head flopping forward because it’s still simply too heavy to lift after the horribly tiring struggle of breaking through its shell to the freedom of the outside world.

Oh, wait!

The head has now floated away from the body and has become a turkey with its butt stuck high in the air, while the chick’s body has morphed into a dancing rooster, reminiscent of Foghorn Leghorn. 

The two are facing each other, and I swear I can actually hear Foghorn instructing the turkey: “Now, boy! I say, boy! Boy, I say! I say! I say, boy, ya gotta hear what I’m sayin’, boy… listen to me, boy…”

And I look again, and they’ve both evaporated into just a few still-diminishing wisps.

Meanwhile, further to the south, a giant anvil has magically transformed itself into the starship Enterprise, complete with two albeit off-kilter nacelles and a command module, tilted towards the heavens to begin a new journey to explore the vast reaches of space and to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

(This cloud has taken on the shape most like the original series Enterprise, before Star Trek Next Generation ventured instead to where “no one” has gone before.)

Or perhaps it is armed with the Genesis Device, in hopes of restoring Spock – whose alter ego Leonard Nemoy left us a few days ago for an exploration that every one of us will eventually undertake… because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.

Now, of course, parts of the Enterprise have faded, its nacelles trimmed and its lower decks shifted into fins, leaving the craft looking more like Flash Gordon’s rocket, headed off to the planet Mongo to do battle with Ming the Merciless.

And there’s a killer whale rising out of the horizon about where the chick/turkey/Foghorn Leghorn faded into oblivion just a few moments ago.

No, wait!

It’s a submarine – one of those short, fat ones that are usually called “submersibles” and are used by modern-day explorers with daring to equal their brains, to descend to the deepest depths of the ocean, to the Marianas Trench or the North Atlantic Rift or the thermal vents off Vancouver Island, where dwell strange creatures and even stranger geological anomalies.

In the time it took me to write that, it has become a shark – definitely a shark. Perhaps a great white, but I think more like a whale shark: huge but harmless.

Lucky for me, blue skies, white clouds, and a warm March day are just enough to overcome a limited desire to write.